Middles Could Be Titles

It could be a place to end says Philip Whalen about a line in a poem by Lew Welch "Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen".

These are the stamps on the final envelope.

Whalen says

That's a great piece of news and I think at that point the poem should have stopped (just between you and me; you're not supposed to listen, Lewie, in heaven). But I think that he has delivered his whole message right there. He could have moved that line, maybe [...] In any case, that's the poem almost, in that one line. Like the title.

Philip Whalen. "Commonplace Discoveries: Lew Welch" in Beats at Naropa edited by Anne Waldman and Laura Wright.

As Whalen intimates, middle passages can also be lifted to become poems, complete on their own. My next example is taken from W.S. Merwin's translation of a poem by Roberto Juarroz (No. 6 in Fifth Vertical Poetry).

Each thing makes a tongue for itself
The glass for example
to talk with the wine.

To read these vertical poems is like to experience the work of Jenny Holzer in one of its incarnations in the displays of electronic signage. There is something akin between presentation of fluid fragments and reading with rearrangement in mind.

And so for day 1126
12.01.2010