9.15.2005

Seem to be going through a phase of inner tumult.

Perhaps because of that, the notion of looking at poetry as "construction" or sculpture appeals to me. To think of the poem as a special kind of object with its own 3- or 4-dimensional character. In this thing, "history" or facts or (auto)biography or description or rhetoric or vocabulary or style or sound or etc... all these things are building materials for something which absorbs them & turns them into something else, something sui generis.

This kind of poetry is the antithesis and the antidote to contemporary forms of attention-deficient scatterbrained distracted intellectual/aesthetic feeding-frenzy, which seems to be the current mode of mental collage-logorrhea.

You can't flake things off from this kind of construction : it's all of a piece, and infinitely self-reflexive & resonant.

(but such a thing would be a bore if simply autotelic, self-contained. the poem would have to be thematically relevant, moving... & yet multiplex, multivalent, multifarious.)

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