Friday, September 17, 2004

a poetics of small things

As what Robert Creeley wrote, small moments of domestic under an umbrella of Pieces. Under the title For Love. Made out of small parts enough to become.

During this flight to Vancouver, what I can see outside the window, a field made of flakes of snow then bound; frozen drops of moisture caught in air. All poems are made out of parts. All poems made out of similar fragments.

In text, with words beside each in a particular order, the forced regiment of linear motion. Words still placed in a particular order.

every (all at (toge (forever) ther) once) thing

– bpNichol, THE MARTYROLOGY BOOK V

All literature, they tell us, is about either sex or death. Never turn down an opportunity, my ex-wife used to tell me, to have sex or be on television. Is this part of the same thing.

Not a poetry of grand ideas but in individual things. "No ideas but in things." Or, what did Auden claim? Poetry makes nothing happen. Instead, I wonder, poetry makes nothing happen.

Of movement and a practice of words through which grand ideas cannot help but be caught.

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