Repetition Inversion Inversion Repetition

Jay Hopler in "The Coast Road", the last poem in The Abridged History of Rain, invites us to pay attention:

It's not what one listens to that matters,
But what one listens for—

I listen for repetition. I listen for inversion.

Take for instance the repetitions in "Umbrian Anecdotes". They unroll like school exercises. In one instance "east" is replaced by "west" and the parakeets in both instances "fly chattering, pieces of ripe fig falling from their orange beaks." These lines from the second stanza provide the bridge between the opening stanza and the third.

Every evening, at sunset, a company of green parakeets leaves the
     fig trees in the garden

[...]

Every evening, at sunset, these parakeets fly, pieces of ripe fig
     falling in the garden

Look what he does with dogs in the eighth section of "The Rooster King"

Dogs pass no laws against you and knock not they your
      daughters up and do not to Manhattan go with your last two
      hundred dollars so, in general
Dogs are A-OK with me.

Later in section thirteen ("So Many Birds to Kill and So Few Stones") we read "one / cannot help but flattened be by the persistence of the beautiful thing" where we almost read presence for persistence.

And so for day 2123
05.10.2012

Moon Sun Owl Crowing

Avital Ronell first brought this Wordsworth poem to my attention in a conversation with Anne Dufourmantelle (Fighting Theory].

[T]his corrosive "thing" that was not legible before and then abruptly emerges or is provoked out of its hiding place. Wordsworth's texts on idiocy are a perfect example. In his time, these were marginal texts that distressed his friend Coleridge, the eminent drug addict. The later, the great philosophical erectus, tried to convince Wordsworth not to write such indigestible texts; he said that such writing was pure regression, and he was sincerely horrified by poems like "Idiot Boy," the one of which Wordsworth was fondest and which those around him found altogether disgraceful. […] However, one day, something in them is going to become readable, for all sorts of reasons and historical availabilities. And Wordsworth for his part adored his own poem on idiocy, though we don't know why. He could never let it go; he never regretted having written it. Worse still, he chose to publish it.

The Idiot Boy ends with in the voice of boy himself relating what he heard and saw after spending the night outdoors amid owls and moonlight. The addressee is the boy's mother.

(His very words I give to you,)
"The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,
And the sun did shine so cold!"
— Thus answered Johnny in his glory,
And that was all his travel's story,

Inversion. At play. Nocturnal transmissions. Daylight images. What's the potential for corrosion? Finding poetry?

And so for day 1451
03.12.2010