It occurs to me that
The Complete Sentence Game could be an entire book, at least of chap-book length. I tend to think in terms of short, chap-book works of poetry, like
The Thelonious Monk Fake Book. Maybe 20-30 pages. Aren't those much more readable than the typical 60 pages format for a book of verse? What perverse publisher or tenure committee thought that one up?
I agree! But, as with most things, I'm conflicted.
ResponderEliminarI love chapbooks and still think Robert Bly's "20 Poems" series of translations (Tranströmer, Trakl, Vallejo, Jacobsen, Aleixandre, etc.) are exemplary.
On the other hand, I'm addicted to volumes of Collected—preferably Complete—Poems: Hughes (both Langston and Ted), John Logan, Thomas Kinsella, Plath and Bishop, Eliot and cummings, Sandburg and Yeats and Rukeyser and Ammons all leap to mind. There is something about sinking into the vasty, imperfect deep where so many strange creatures have their lives—something about abundance (or relative abundance, in the cases of Eliot and Bishop)—that reminds me that poetry is really a process of awareness, an evolution of knowing.
Along the way, though—the smaller surges of coherence are wonderful....
I like Collected Poems better than the 60 page volume, as a format. So I like long and short more than medium.
ResponderEliminarOf course, I do love many individual volumes of poetry of about 60 pages, but I resent the ubiquity of that structure.
Seconding the preference for short sequences -- they're much less tolerant of flab. And three of them can make a very fine 60 page collection.
ResponderEliminar