"Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sound - long sounds and short sounds, heavy beats and light beats, the tone relations of vowels, the relations of consonants to one another . . . Reading in silence is the source of half the misconceptions that have caused the public to distrust poetry."
he was one of the last "old school" modernists in the poundian mode. not as inventive as pound nor as profound as eliot, his ear for the musicality of the english language is pretty damned finely tuned. read these next few lines out loud & you can't help but experience what he was trying to accomplish.
unfortunately, his connection w/pound personally caused him to be viewed suspiciously & his poetry to be casually ignored or dismissed as "minor".
Every birth a crime,
every sentence life.
Wiped of mould and mites
would the ball run true?
No hope of going back.
Hounds falter and stray,
shame deflects the pen.
Love murdered neither bleeds nor stifles
but jogs the draftsman’s elbow.
What can he, changed, tell
her, changed, perhaps dead?
Delight dwindles. Blame
stays the same. from BRIGGFLATTS
No comments:
Post a Comment