 Ange Mlinko: 03.06.06-03.10.06Tuesday 03.07.06 Stephen Burt has almost pre-empted one of my major questions of late. In his review of Jennifer Michael Hecht’s new book in The Believer, he asks what the difference is between a verse line and a punch line. . . . . . . I’m always attracted to arresting first lines, to being pulled into the stream of a poem trying to guess “How’s she going to follow up on this?”
“Perhaps we ought to feel with more imagination.”—John Ashbery But what is it beyond the semantic content of a line that makes it arresting? At random I grabbed a few books considered funny or witty and pulled out lines:
like the glass electric gun of Alexander Volta
A long time you have been making the trip It is the author of “The Comedian As the Letter C” who created the blueprint for this tone-mixing noun-bumping proper-name-beeping poetry. How odd that Wallace Stevens is seen as a great poet of meditative inwardness when he consistently wrings the comic potential from mere syllables, let alone images (“No Possum, No Sop, No Taters”; “The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade”) It was also Stevens who taught me to hear rhyme as essentially funny. It’s true I can’t take rhyme seriously. The Greeks couldn’t either: according to my Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, there isn’t much rhyme to be found in the ancients, but “Euripides in the Alcestis has a drunk Hercules speak in rhyme, a passage clearly meant to be comic.” And when I think of my favorite rhymers I think of Pope and Byron and early Stevens and Paul Muldoon. If we don’t foreground the physical properties of language in order to get a totally proprioceptive shiver, what’s the point of writing poems? Or, what’s poetry got that no other genre has? Perhaps nothing! Perhaps just a very elastic notion of “the line,” as in “When James Schuyler read at DIA the line stretched around the block.” That oft-repeated anecdote attests to a secret correspondence: it is Schuyler’s poetic line that famously goes around the block. Well, it is the end of winter, and the sensorium is depleted here in the Northeast waiting for a vernal miracle. No wonder I want so much. But I stepped out back and saw a pale green shoot in an urn – I had worried that some varmint had dug out the corms I planted – and the weather forecast looks good. O, one more fragment from our Comedian, please:
He came. The poetic hero without palms CommentsOn 03.08.06 john wrote: When I went home a couple weeks ago for my dad's surgery, I took Olson's "Proprioception" with me. Before the surgery the surgeons explained that my dad's proprioceptive capacity might be diminished for a while afterwards. I said wow, that's a word I've never heard in conversation before. The doctor laughed when I showed him the book in my bag. (My dad's surgery went fine. His proprioception is improving.) Great post on the essential Whatness of poetry. Stevens is the shizzle, and the Tin Pan Alleycats agree with you & Byron that rhyme is essentially comic. On 03.08.06 thewizzyman wrote: It always disheartens me when people use School of Quietude, but when it's whom I assume to be a great poet, well, that just brings me down. WTF? On 03.09.06 Ange wrote: Spicergirl's right about the dictionary def of proprioception -- my memory of Olson's use of the term may be faulty, but I am pretty sure he refers to it as the sense at the surface/boundary of the skin where the world and the body meet. I'm not so sure he meant it as metaphor. On 03.10.06 Ben Friedlander wrote: For what it's worth, Olson's note on "Proprioception" was an attempt to redefine "depth psychology" in physical terms, taking literally the idea that the "soul" (the "psyche" of psychoanalysis, the unconsconsious) is "in" the body. A Jungian influence, I gather. The note does begin with a reference to the "surface," and the intriguing notion that the body as a whole is the "skin" of the "human universe." But near the end of the note he makes a clear distinction between "surface" (which he links to "projection") and "cavity," suggesting that proprioception is the complement of Projective Verse. In any case, if consciousness is in the body, the shiver of recognition is no less a datum of proprioception than a toothache. But it need not be the physicality of words that causes this shiver, as anyone who has ever turned cold upon learning bad news can affirm. |
 Ange Mlinko is the author of two books, Matinees (Zoland Books, 1999) and Starred Wire (Coffee House Press, 2005) which was a National Poetry Series winner in 2004, and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award. She was born in Philadelphia, and currently lives in Brooklyn. She has lived and worked in Providence, Boston, and Morocco. She has taught poetry at Brown, the Naropa University Summer Writing Program and Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. Her poems are about urban life, about language and its failings, about the things we see and do not see. She is often compared to Frank O’Hara. The New Yorker praised her “unique sense of humor and mystery.” |
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On 03.07.06 spicergirl wrote:
Congrats on being chosen for this honor, I suppose, or for being co-opted into the SoQ camp. About your use of proprioception--I know it's a great Olson term, and that he's using it figuratively, using it not to mean the body's own sense of its own awareness to the sense (the old touch yr finger to the nose to see if yr drunk or not) of the body in space, etc. But to use it in simple terms of visceral reaction to sound (as in Houseman's old hair-standing up on the back of the neck test)--well, I suppose it sure is a purty word and all....