Craft Witnessed

Phoebe Wang is a consummate artist in the selections she makes in the construction of a poem's small and large features. Take for example some lines from "Custom Design" as published in a chapbook, Hanging Exhibitions from The Emergency Response Unit.

See what one word changes. "A childhood shared / with a cacophony of brothers and cousins, hungry for half, / a quarter, a sliver of adventure." are the lines in Hanging Exhibitions. The version published in Admission Requirements replaces "cacophony" with "riptide". "A childhood shared / with a riptide of brothers and cousins, hungry for half, / a quarter, a sliver of adventure." The second version pulls whereas the first merely resounds.

The final stanza's "practiced hand" is substituted by "emboldened hand" and the layout of the cascading lines is different — inversed.

as if against a phantom wind until they crawl      foolishly out of closets to obey the commands of the eye, the line and the practiced hand.

as if against a phantom wind until they crawl      foolishly out of closets to obey the commands           of the eye, the line, and the emboldened hand.

I first twigged to Phoebe Wang's gift of precision when I heard her read "The Cartographer" where she evokes the young map maker:

I conjure you drawing in the margins
of your schoolbooks — spice caravans, camels, men made

of embroidery with black pepper beards. […]

The embroidery befits a marginal sketch and the colour of "black pepper" chafes against the cliche of "salt and pepper" and the enjambement not only over line but also over stanza signals implicitly the extent of the marginalia running away down the side of the page and away in imagination.

All because of a careful attention to detail. Important for any conjurer or map maker.

And so for day 1892
17.02.2012

Variations Again Ours

When it first appeared in Double Going the first line of "An Abiding" by Richard Foerster was the beginning of a long apostrophe to the stricken one.

The day the x-ray showed your lung ghost-laced

When the poem reappears in a slightly different incarnation in The Burning of Troy, all the lines remain the same, except for the keystone first line which switches the addressee

The day the x-ray showed his lung ghost-laced

What does not change from version to version is the "we" the reader is invited to identify with.

And so for day 1491
12.01.2011

Two Versions of Fire Work

With his impeccable horticultural acumen Richard Foerster takes the reader on a tour of a plant through both is parts in space and its development in time.

I first encountered the poem as the penultimate poem in The Burning of Troy. I then located it online in the Alabama Literary Review Volume 17 (Spring 2007) where I found it displayed in "couplets" or rather stanzas of two lines. For me, the sweep was lost. The white space lead to too much emphasis on the words at the end of lines which obscures some of the internal repetitions such as "seadrift" and "drift". In the book, the poem is reminiscent of an ode with movements. The stanzas cohere as elemental shifts threaten to make the whole edifice explode — very like a poppy tossing its petals to the winds. But look at the endings of the stanzas for the metamorphosis is primely featured: "accidental loppings" "splendid seduction" "at a stroke, become" "rattling pods". So the eye travels along the fuse.

Flame
I don't want to think about anything, except to become language. —Stanley Kunitz
Once again the poppies: I'd stay the wind to keep their pure scorch, this conflagration thrusting up from mulish roots despite years of my spade's accidental loppings. This morning it seemed a hundred crimson Hydra heads rose through the seadrift fog, the kind of monstrous beauty we demand of myth in the aftermath of winter. That's the problem, isn't it: the splendid seduction of these Salomes, what they unveil in stages, the black intent they keep hidden till the end within scrolled parchments, the taunting logic we can't help thoughtlessly lusting after, and would, at a stroke, become, even as the leaves drift toward jaundice beneath brittle, rattling pods.	Once again the poppies: I'd stay the wind to keep their pure scorch, this conflagration thrusting up from mulish roots despite years of my spade's accidental loppings. This morning it seemed a hundred crimson Hydra heads rose through the seadrift fog, the kind of monstrous beauty we demand of myth in the aftermath of winter. That's the problem, isn't it: the splendid seduction of these Salomes, what they unveil in stages, the black intent they keep hidden till the end within scrolled parchments, the taunting logic we can't help thoughtlessly lusting after, and would, at a stroke, become, even as the leaves drift toward jaundice beneath brittle, rattling pods.

Sometimes thinking about language means thinking about layout. The white space determines rhythm and whether or not the reader is invited to linger and simmer until the words are burned into memory crackling like brittle, rattling pods offered to a flame. One of these versions burns. The other sputters.

And so for day 1490
11.01.2011

Small Argument with Small Arguments

There are two versions of "Water"

2001 - Still Life
2003 - Small Arguments


takes shape / uncertain of its own / in the palm, in glass / lifting to drain

and takes shape / uncertain of its own: // in the palm of a hand / a glass lifted to drain

I like the version better from the chapbook Still Life which was

Distributed in Canada by the author
Published without assistance
Typeset Book Antiqua, 6 point, photocopied

in the palm, glass

is succinct and evocative — an envious combo

the version in Small Arguments seems by contrast cluttered
the version in Still Life wavers on the theme of uncertainty and succeeds in conveying stillness in the midst of movement; an accomplishment

In 2002 "Water" won the Lina Chartrand Award. One wonders in which version. in palm, in glass

And so for day 1462
14.12.2010

Lucent Lunacies

At the heart of stasis is repetition. À l'image-temps.

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

[…]

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

This is what having seen the loop of planes crashing into skyscrapers has revealed again — there is a standing still in the jetztzeit. For us, finding Benjamin's notion in the repeated lines Archibald MacLeish's Ars Poetica.

How very interesting about the punctuation (or lack thereof). In the anthology The Imagist Poem edited by William Pratt, the lines quoted above from "Ars Poetica" have no punctuation marks at line ending. This for me lends more of the arresting effect when the identical lines are re-encountered in the reading. However, the Poetry Foundation serves a version from the Collected Poems 1917-1982 (copyright 1985) which version groups the stanza in sections and offers variant punctuation.

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

The Poetry Foundation also offers a facsimile of its publication in the June 1926 edition of Poetry magazine where the lines are punctuated differently (and no grouping of the stanzas) …

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs;

[…]

A should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

Pratt included in the Imagist anthology a version from Collected Poems by Archibald MacLeish 1917-1952 (copyright 1954).

So my stasis-as-repetition comment rests on but one version of a poem that exists in multiple versions. One tiny moment caught in the aperture of criticism.

And so for day 1436
18.11.2010

Renovations

"double / back again"

It's the line break that caught my attention in the poem "Essay: The Love of Old Houses" by Mark Doty

here it's proved that time requires
a deeper, better verb than pass;
it's more like pool, and ebb, and double
back again, my history, his, yours,

I first encountered the poem in fire to fire and learnt it came from the collection Source where the information is supplied about an earlier version in the periodical Witness.

Witness was not in any of the libraries I frequent (a university research library and a public library). And back issues are sold out. One kind soul supplied me with images of the Doty poem in Love in America Vol. XIII No. 2 (1999). Here transcribed:

that time requires a deeper, better
verb than pass; it's more like pool,
and ebb, and double back again,
my history, his, and yours

The enjambement in the later version "double / back again" is more like the flow of a fish arcing its back than the unbroken "double back again" and is more in keeping with the theme of ebb and pool. The new placement of the italicized pass at line's end lends it more prominence and its cusp position lends it a greater note of transience. As well, the addition of a comma after "yours" orchestrates the linkage into the next stanza.

subsumed into the steadying frame
of a phrase I love: a building
both noun and verb, where we live
and what we do: fill it with ourselves,

And retroactively we sense that pass too is a noun, a place of the going through, much like a line of poetry.

Credit to Doty for inviting a peek at the poet's workshop (he writes at the beginning of Source that earlier versions appeared).

And thanks to Joseph Langdon, Managing Editor, Witness, for providing me with images of the Witness variants.

And so for day 1025
03.10.2009

Kaffeeklatch Talk

Found in reviews of a coffee house situated in Atlanta, Georgia, variant spellings of "spiel"

spheal

a long schpeeeeel

Playful ways to describe barista disquisitions on the making of a good cup. A purist, I think I will stick to the official spelling and its aroma of the German origins in the word meaning to play.

And so for day 289
29.09.2007