Question #5) In issue #4 Bill
Tremblay asks, “How
many ways can you praise the sky?” “How many ways can
you come up with to know the sky?”
Anti-epigraph
Be aware that everything in our bildopedic culture, in our
politics of the encyclopedic, in our telecommunications of all
genres,
in our telematicometaphysical archives, in our library, for
example the Bodleian, everything is constructed on the protocolary
charter
of an axiom, that could be demonstrated, displayed on a large
carte,
a postcard of course…
Jacques Derrida
To wake is to want to praise it, along with everything else in
between, including perhaps the recent dream urging one on to
the place that waits. The sky that awaits the soul, as the earth
the body.
Elissa Marder sees the sky as key to the work
of the innovator of the prose poem, “One might go so far as to say that the
sky – in Baudelaire – is made of language and it is
this celestial language that gives time, memory, and perception
to man.” Is there greater praise than to attribute language
to a thing?
It makes one think of Olson’s admonition in Projective
Verse,
that were we to listen close enough, we could hear “secrets
objects share.”
Sky, grand illusion of wholeness. Mask of
chaos. Vast container of fragmentation. Words of praise? When
I think of the prose poem,
I think of it similarly: the prose poem, which will not be pigeon-holed,
nor classified, gentrified, nor genred.
The best aspects of the
form include the space it provides for writing the quickest way
possible. Olson wanted Rimbaudean velocity
across the line, one perception immediately upon another. As
if it were collage fragment added in such a way that one grapheme
illuminates another, where signifier joins hands with signified
under scratch of pen or percussive key.
Refusing the aid of line
breaks (or being slowed down by the decision) to contribute to
the rhythm of the work, keeping it internal, more
closely matching where it stems from, desire, cathexion.
Earlier
in the week I dug up a copy of a letter sent to a poet friend in
1991, when I worked at the National
Gallery of Art Library
in Washington, the first paragraph of which read, “Inner
fragmentation, isn’t that what the prose poem must contain
by its form? Driven this far away to what? To force within.”
Why
am I thinking of the postcard today? The pleasure the postcard
brings, gives, sends? Coalescing perceptions
at once, in limited, & yet
if treated freely, generously, & most creatively, in unlimited
space.
At the same time, wanting as much blank space,
or as little, to leave or fill with what will strike visually,
tactically, haptically,
always from that new place, at the heart of the sender. Or, as
Barthes reveals in Writing Degree Zero: “So that style is
always a secret… its secret is recollection locked within
the body of the writer.”
Postcard, prose poem, much in common, including
that quality essential to the act of writing: humility. Prose
poem, postcard: one side
text, other side picture. The assemblage of paragraph at greatest
thrust, at lift-off, one of burning fragments that evolve/dissolve
into each other for greater clarity: at the point Benjamin would
call “Now-Time.”
This epistolary act?
Without designated audience.
The
Maximus Poems began as letters. Toward their end Olson can find
no greater praise in one case, (listing
those he loved), than: “Allen
Ginsberg… his unbelievable ability to make a picture postcard
alive front & back”.
Bio
A review of Robert Gibbons’ first
two full-length books of prose poems, Streets for Two Dancers and The Book
of Assassinations,
(Six Gallery Press), is in Poetic
Inhalation.
His latest book of prose poems, Body of Time, is reviewed
in Evergreen
Review.
A recent profile appeared in the Portland
Phoenix.
He has just been named poetry and fiction editor at Janus
Head.
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