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Post by ellaadkins on Jan 15, 2023 20:47:59 GMT -5
COMPOST
When discussing this poem briefly in our zoom last week, Al made a reference to compost and the comparison has remained sticky in my brain.
This poem is a collection of 'scraps' as some people have already mentioned, scraps that aren't necessarily randomly chosen but come from distinct and varying sources.
Knowing that these are found sentences from books that Retallack is about getting rid off, you begin reading each line as distinct. However, you can't help it, as a reader, to start to experience the cross pollination of ideas and themes. You almost witness a blend, that isn't seamless, yet fertile in its final composition, full of possibility. Like compost!
Maybe that's an over romanticization but, selfishly, I love compost and this poem.
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Post by Jason Luz on Jan 16, 2023 14:11:48 GMT -5
Some random thoughts: —The cheekiness of not having finished or perhaps even started a book, but being able to say you've written through a book from cover to cover. —Again the mishmash of registers, like in the first poem we discussed.
—Also the intrusion of the banal into this rarefied space of contemplation: these are some lines from some books that for whatever reason I didn't read and am now discarding or giving away, and oh—'Wittgenstein'— "Did you get the money we sent?"
—The way it's not a Cage in the sense that unlike Cage's mesostics which were often Odes, these clipped lines are tokens of regret for not having gotten to know something better, but maybe in this way it *is* like a Cage: a procedural elegy.
The unspoken I circumscribed by the books chosen by the poet only to be relinquished, the width and breadth of the interests or disinterest here, making me think of Roland Barthes' list of likes and dislikes, our personal effects as affective tokens.
—The way the aleatory still entails choice, writerly agency, massaging: the choice of books discarded, possibly the order of the lines (the ironic ponderousness of that closure--The most obscure things have already been said.) The choice whether or not the experiment produces interesting enough results to share. The choice of that title.
—I think someone on poemtalk or some other video discussion may have said this: the way the opening and closing lines, are like Cage opening and closing of the piano fallboard that frames 4"33'.
--the poetics of epigraphs, the way they broadly gesture toward a theme or subject, not quite circumscribing the rest of the book, but in some gnomic asymptotic or tangential way prefiguring the phase space, a cage not for enclosing but demarcating a metaphysical space
--the way PO in poethics makes me think of a poboy sandwich, enclosures for all possibilities of deep fried congealed delights |
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Post by Jason Luz on Jan 16, 2023 14:17:43 GMT -5
One lesson I take from this poem is to pay attention. She composed this poem from scraps. Not every line is a gem, but isn't that true for every poem? But as you about your day -- full of ambient noises (i.e. scraps) -- the radio, tv, overheard conversations, the internet, books, newspapers, interruptions, animals -- there are poems waiting in all that babble. Some of the more salient lines, like the one that delivers the title, wouldn't have the punch they do if they weren't surrounded by "ambient noise". Also the punchline of that closure. It's something I've noticed in music too, the way ambient noise can buffer, buoy, or add nuance to a naked melody or voice, maybe something about transforming a timbre?—maybe like in that Stevens poem "The Idea of Order at Key West" |
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Post by Jason Luz on Jan 16, 2023 14:19:33 GMT -5
COMPOST When discussing this poem briefly in our zoom last week, Al made a reference to compost and the comparison has remained sticky in my brain. This poem is a collection of 'scraps' as some people have already mentioned, scraps that aren't necessarily randomly chosen but come from distinct and varying sources. Knowing that these are found sentences from books that Retallack is about getting rid off, you begin reading each line as distinct. However, you can't help it, as a reader, to start to experience the cross pollination of ideas and themes. You almost witness a blend, that isn't seamless, yet fertile in its final composition, full of possibility. Like compost! Maybe that's an over romanticization but, selfishly, I love compost and this poem. Yes! it's a revaluation of abjection |
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Ross
ModPo student
Posts: 5
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Post by Ross on Jan 16, 2023 15:18:49 GMT -5
Not a Cage seems like an example of implementing the idea that Retallack recounts in the discussion in PoemTalk #175 about Quinta Slef and the importance of dislodging the path that one's neural pathways are on in order to reveal possibilities. Maybe it's obvious, but the aleatory aggregating of first and last thoughts from dozens of composers is challenging (or daring) the reader to conjure a new pathway that would not (could not) have been created by the composer's associational thoughts.
So Retallack's earnest exhortation to try new things and methods is intriguing and helpful. I also keep coming back to her meliorist orientation in the face of material circumstances that can be daunting, which I find refreshing.
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Post by Paul K on Jan 17, 2023 0:35:59 GMT -5
One lesson I take from this poem is to pay attention. She composed this poem from scraps. Not every line is a gem, but isn't that true for every poem? But as you about your day -- full of ambient noises (i.e. scraps) -- the radio, tv, overheard conversations, the internet, books, newspapers, interruptions, animals -- there are poems waiting in all that babble. Some of the more salient lines, like the one that delivers the title, wouldn't have the punch they do if they weren't surrounded by "ambient noise". Also the punchline of that closure. It's something I've noticed in music too, the way ambient noise can buffer, buoy, or add nuance to a naked melody or voice, maybe something about transforming a timbre?—maybe like in that Stevens poem "The Idea of Order at Key West" JG (is that you appropriate moniker?) - Are you comparing the sounds of the sea in Stevens's poem to ambient noise that somehow enhances the voice of his singer?
-Paul
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Post by Jason Luz on Jan 17, 2023 9:12:44 GMT -5
Some of the more salient lines, like the one that delivers the title, wouldn't have the punch they do if they weren't surrounded by "ambient noise". Also the punchline of that closure. It's something I've noticed in music too, the way ambient noise can buffer, buoy, or add nuance to a naked melody or voice, maybe something about transforming a timbre?—maybe like in that Stevens poem "The Idea of Order at Key West" JG (is that you appropriate moniker?) - Are you comparing the sounds of the sea in Stevens's poem to ambient noise that somehow enhances the voice of his singer?
-Paul
Ghostlier demarcations keener sounds, like singing in the shower! It's not only the reverb but the white noise of the water? |
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