Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Rereading William Fuller's Watchword; wondering if Fuller isn't the closest US poetry has to JH Prynne. Fuller's poems aren't as dense, as impactedly curious as Prynne's – not by a long shot – but they have a kind of crosscutting of lexis & range of reference that reminds me very much at times of JHP's. A sort of "ventilated" Prynne, opened up to rhetorical gestures & lyricisms that are far more foreshortened in JHP's own work?
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How much of the current success of the Obama/Biden ticket can one put down to canny marketing? That big "O" logo, for instance (as I'm reminded by Daily Kos), is a brilliant piece of design. Check out the witty variations on the O tailored for 23 – count 'em, twenty-three – different subgroups of potential Obama supporters.
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The most surprising birthday present last week was an appearance in the "Issue 1" anthology, along with 1499 other poets, non-poets, & bits of nominal internet gibberish. Here's "my" poem (p. 1135), which I rather like, & will be adopting (or at least cannibalizing):
Like white hints
Like honest phrases
Like right years

There he might be a method even
though he thumbs like a phrase
In early spring
he scrawls her
This current may lose and glance, but
it is bitterly white
He is white
Because of everything that
is luminous
Seeing like a cover
the clean writings, lost by
a fair note,
slip

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

a good thought exercise--thank you

maybe what you call “crosscutting of lexis & range of reference” is only one point of comparison. might syntax be another?

and the lyricism of Prynne is not so much foreshortened as anamorphic. still, you were right to choose a term from painting to describe it.

is it the earlier Prynne [eg White Stones] that you compare Fuller’s work to?

sorry, I responded to your questions with more questions. as I said, a good thought exercise…

Su said...

On Issue 1:

At least you got one that suits you. The one attributed to me is on page 1773. I think it was written on a diaper during a drug-induced orgy at an assisted living facility; translated in Nigeria and then e-mailed in a mass "Mr. Esquire, esq." spamming to a three-year-old who also accidently saw the most horrifying clips from Silence of the Lambs and made some crucial editorial decisions before converting it to .pdf.

Oh, shoot. It does suit me, doesn't it?