EthicalDative

Call it the agony of the long-distance reader. There’s a lot of verse out there. It’s hard to give any one text a non-cursory read. On occasion there’s a specimen I’d like to flounder around in, nudge and knock about, importune, reconnoitre. Something lands; or tickles; or excites; or provokes; or befuddles. But wait… what’s this? More verse coming down the pike! Must… keep… reading. <Gasp>

An upside hides in what I’ve depicted as the downside of a landslide. I know that I will know when I’ve bumped into greatness. It will be when a text has shattering immediacy. It will poke through the scree, knock me sideways, shock me to a standstill. A writer will have been astonishing and I’ll have met the poem. I’ve gotta be ready, loins girded for the long haul.

Idra Novey’s “That’s How Far I’d Drive for It” (Poetry, November 2023) tickled. A cross between wry poetry and delicious standup (think Tig Notaro), it limns a beautiful, trippy, preposterous expedition to transplant a venerable rhubarb plant. Here’s how it takes off:

I’m in the car with Helen, supreme guide to proceeding otherwise.

My relatives refused to travel hours for a rhubarb, but Helen said, why get out of bed, if not for a private quest of minor significance to anyone else?

It’s a question of libido, she said, sometimes you wake up craving sex.

Other days a hunger comes for shoveling, to dig up whatever your relatives deem worthless.

As the poem arcs and flies it mentions this:

Meaning is a hunger. Some of us need to eat and eat it.

“Frank Marshall Davis: Writer” (Poetry, December 2023) sprang a sticky line on me: “I was black and black I always was.” (Davis lived from 1905 to 1987.) Among other things the poem says this:

I was a weaver of jagged words,
A warbler of garbled tunes
A singer of savage songs
I was bitter
Yes
Bitter and sorely sad
For when I wrote
I dipped my pen
In the crazy heart
Of mad America

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

It’s possible to attribute eccentric form to lineated discourse that’s unscannable. Discard capitalization, italics and punctuation. What’s left is line. Lines have their element, like a fish its water, in white space aka page space. The writer commandeers spacing as a tool with which to impinge upon the reader’s faculty for apprehending utterance.

The manner in which words occupy their space is a force multiplier. Features such as indentation, word and letter hyper-gapping, and geminative CRLFs arguably boost signal.

One infers a dynamic of phrasing, a chafing of lexicon, a flexing of syntax conjured in the writer’s mind, to which conformation the writer constrains the spill of printed text over, across, down and around the page. All aspects of two dimensions figure, including the upside down.

Bespoke word placement on the typeset plane groups, isolates, steers, focuses, creates cleavage, clash, attraction of reference and connotation. The text is more than the sum of its particles and lexemes; read but also viewed. To cite such text one best photographs it, or else sketches it cursively. It’s an uttered image, a laidout revelation, a verbal spectacle.

Aggressive space allocation confers an authorial bossiness on the text. One infers that the writer is at special pains to manage the flow of thought and emotion sought to be conveyed.

One infers that the writer has plumbed private intuition in order to instantiate a one-off, typographical form factor suited for optimal expression of a distinctly personal, or universally resonant, noteworthy, communicable psychic event.

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved