BERNEVAL

Tim Lilburn in the preface to Thinking and Singing has this phrase which I lift from an enumeration of other phrases and leave to stand alone: “lifting to the tongue latent things”. Out of its context I would have its latencies serve as a lively echo to this section from Dennis Lee’s contribution (“Body Music: Notes on Rhythm in Poetry”) to the collection of essays by various voices. Early in Lee’s essay this section incorporates some of the key technical vocabulary from his essay but lays it out as a poem in itself.

I’m drawn to terms like these.
          Prosody as sonic improvisation. Polyrhythmic form. A kinetics of meaning: clenched, a galumph, then wash of a liminal segue. Forward momentum; lateral gusts. Kinaesthetic knowing. Trajectories in audio space. Scoring the energy spoor. The rhythmic manifold. A poetics of voice in motion. Cosmophony. Body music.

For a different mode or cadence, go backwards, body music, cosmophony, a poetics of voice in motion, the rhythmic manifold… dropping from the tongue.

And so for day 1069
16.11.2009

In a poem that rings the changes between “hang on”, “hold on” and “hand on” there is a concluding openness in the lines that brush up against attachment to confer upon the reader a line without punctuation that suspends the imagination, leaves it hovering over it knows not what, word or world. From “Where Things Come Together” in A Possible Landscape by Maureen Harris…

What I mean to tell you.
Naming is another way to hand on.
In this country anything

I think it is vital to the experience of these lines that the verb tense is inflected to the present or even the future — what I mean to tell — and then the present reasserts itself in an almost timeless manner with the strength of the copula in defining what is naming. And then the whole thing explodes and the periods gone in the last line make in a retrospective move the other previous periods provisional so that a hindsight sort of enjambement inhabits the lines each handing on something to the next and abolishing the full stop and making it into a pause.

Harris gives us more of the delightful acute attention to small words in a play on somewhere/somehow at the conclusion of “Emblem” in the same collection.

only a choice of directions and I am going some
how at every moment I am still going on somewhere —
There is no moment in which I am standing still.

And here a period closes the poem but we know that it doesn’t mark a standing still but leaves a strong mark of arrest for the “no moment”. The period is still a stop but the “I” escapes in a movement all its own.

And so for day 1068
15.11.2009

Aislinn Hunter in her contribution to A Ragged Pen: Essays on Poetry & Memory develops a conceit comparing a poem and furniture.

I believe when we read a poem we enter a room. A room fashioned by the poet from his, or her, own life, from a sense of the fragmentary world, from a preference for certain kinds of language, certain kinds of furniture.

It just so happens that I was also reading John Terpstra’s Naked Trees close to the time I was plunged into the essays of A Ragged Pen. There is a moment in the deciduary sequence that the narrator comments on a group assembled around a table for dinner. In “Headiness” our narrator likens the legs of the table to the trunks of trees, and even at one point “wanted to say that I saw a crown shaken by the breeze” when “everyone burst with laughter”. This sensitivity to the traces of the wood in the furniture is played out in the conclusion to “Prunus serotina” where veneration borders on fetish worship.

Wandering through the ranging shades of Black Cherry; the cream, fawn, chocolate, rouge. And its figured grain, an inner life exposed. See. Feel how smooth. Voyeur to this flesh of wood you’re privileged to touch. Privy to the naked lives of trees.

Poem, furniture, tree, each demands attention. Each act of attending places the body and its store of preferences in contact with what has grown and invites some musing about those growth conditions that led to what is beheld and held.

And so for day 1064
11.11.2009