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I copied the following words this evening
from the poet William Carlos Williams. He is writing about
the nature of poetry. "What most obviously distinguishes
a piece of free verse from prose? It is the lining on the
page. Even in the dreariest piece of writing that aspires
to be free verse, the fact of its being set off in lines has
some significance. It is significant, for one thing, because
it pretends to be significant. That is, we have to dwell on
the line as a unit, even if, by ordinary standards, we can
find no unity. The very arbitrariness of the slashing across
the prose sentence may be important. The line set off by this
slashing, whatever its content, is brought into special focus;
it makes a special claim on our attention by the mere fact
of being set off; the words demand to be looked at freshly.
And the whole composition makes, we may say, an important
negative claimthe claim of not being prose. The only lines
that are not absolutely arbitrary are those which have a certain
intrinsic structure, the structure of a clause. The lining
is so arbitrary that we have to see the poem in print before
we have any notion that it is intended as a poem at all. But
the very arbitrariness is the point. We are forced to focus
our attention upon words and details, in a very special way,
a puzzling way. Now the poem itself is about that puzzling
portentousness that an object, even the simplest, like a red
wheelbarrow, assumes when we fix attention exclusively upon
it. Reading the poem is like peering at some ordinary object
through a pin prick in a piece of cardboard. The fact that
the pin prick frames it arbitrarily endows it with a puzzling
and exciting freshness that seems to hover on the verge of
revelation. And that is what the poem is actually about: "So
much depends"but what, we do not know.
- Ron Price with thanks
to William Carlos Williams, quoted in Ron Silliman, "The
Desert Modernism," Electronic Poetry Review, No.4,
2002.
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Ron
Price
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"YELLOW LEAVES"
What I leave on these pages
will be yellow leaves [1]
on their way to death,
ashen-with-emptiness,
denuded of all that is life.
I will also leave, too,
fresh grapes, white blossoms,
fruits of a consecrated joy
in these days of a new springtime
when the earth
had its earliest decades,
epochs it seemed
and I grew into a man
and became old.
© Ron Price
3 January 2003
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