Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Internet is back up after going down for four days. This post is a composite of things. First off, I just finished reading Cyril's new book Straw, Sticks and Bricks . As the title suggests, this collection of prose poems is built on the idea of language as a possible home. Each poem is a "protracted" sentence, joining clauses and phrases with the useful glue of semi-colons. Formally, the book is the the most unified sequence that Cyril has written. That formal unity undergirds an expansion of subject matter. These poems venture from meditations on self to criticism of society. "Notes from a Religious Mind" and "Programme for Transcending Acquisitiveness" aims at social deformations indicated in the poems' titles. The more relaxed form of the prose poem permits Cyril, it seems to me, to experiment with other tones besides the  fiercely and exquisitely lyrical voice that he has perfected. My favorites of the collection are "Telephone,...

Carp Swimming this dissension into fish or birds             dg nanouk okpik, “For-The-Spirits-Who-Have-Rounded-The-Bend” Because I can look for hours at carp swimming, red lightning, gracious torpedo, although bullfrogs croak for a groggy season, and mosquitoes breed irritation into fever, Aedes mosquitoes, flying rats, carriers of breakbone fever, water poison, although the Chinese water snake, crepuscular in its habit, olive brown, “a longitudinal stripe of dark salmon extending from head to tail,” is hunted and killed for manufacturing snake oil to cure arthritis, killed for being useful, because I can stare for whole days at carp swimming, although the willows bend their heads and cry for god knows what, because I can look at carp swimming and see the lightning, I have hope that I will survive the bullfrogs, the mosquitoes, and even the snares of snake oil makers, th...

Thanks to Edward Moran, I just discovered Hyam Plutzik . Son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he became an English professor at the University of Rochester, and, though he died in 1962, a poet at large. His words quoted on his homepage immediately resonate with me: I once looked at poetry as little more than beautiful language. Later it was a way of communicating the nuances of the world. More recently I have begun to look at poetry as the great synthesizer, the humanizer of knowledge. The three ways of looking are not three different ways, but each rises into the next, as beauty becomes nuance, and nuance becomes synthesis. Or, to see the interrelationship from a different end, synthesis is valuable so long as it depends on nuance, and nuance must rest on an appreciation of beauty. The goal of synthesis echoes that of Hesse's The Glass Bead Game , in which the game is to unify all knowledge. Whereas Hesse's master-language is music, and his chosen form the quest novel, Plutzik...