5 critical minutes
What a weird beast poetry is. I open a chapbook and read:
gilda is a white-throat child
a throw open door-child
a missing in the attic child
and gilda, the lay assassin
has no hands
gilda: still lay
them upon me
-- from Andrea Baker's Gilda.
In a way, I could read this and "nothing happens". Nothing sucks me in, so I have to return to the page. This is where poetry is different than almost any form of writing - just because it doesn't "grab" me doesn't mean there is no erotic tug. Most other literary modes lays a seduction trance groove down with the first line, and the paragraphs represent a continual holding, a reeling in. Poetry demands a fluency - or can demand one - with language, with reading, at once greater, less, more varied and unpredictable. There is a first line here, it tells me of Gilda, makes a claim as to who she is. But what a "white-throat child" is, I could not say definitively. I must re-read it. Look at the hypen, the "is," constellate it with "child" - certain fleeting impressions of vulnerability, sensuality, a smallness, cross me. tender, not seasoned (neither black nor tan). racial? yes.
the next two lines tell more, pile on this lower case character. now i have a sense of here0 thrown open, missing, in the corners of our homes, almost abandoned...
til i get to "lay assassin". here's one of those leaps - even in a narrative poem, that other genres flourish once every 50 pages to startle the reader - and which poetry can toss of every couples lines - no big deal. but it certainly forces the reader to re-focus, review, reconsider. this attic founderling is capable of murder, a murder at once sacred and profane ( lay being distinct from secular - lay being opposed to ordained).
jump again - gilda is crippled. she lacks digits, she is retarded in doing, she can not hold or grab.
(not as one with hands can).
yet - switch of voice - switch of case - she is addressed, comanded or implored - to use the hands she does not have, to touch another body, another "me".
hands she doesn't/does have. an impossibility? fuck if i know, this is just the first page...
gilda is a white-throat child
a throw open door-child
a missing in the attic child
and gilda, the lay assassin
has no hands
gilda: still lay
them upon me
-- from Andrea Baker's Gilda.
In a way, I could read this and "nothing happens". Nothing sucks me in, so I have to return to the page. This is where poetry is different than almost any form of writing - just because it doesn't "grab" me doesn't mean there is no erotic tug. Most other literary modes lays a seduction trance groove down with the first line, and the paragraphs represent a continual holding, a reeling in. Poetry demands a fluency - or can demand one - with language, with reading, at once greater, less, more varied and unpredictable. There is a first line here, it tells me of Gilda, makes a claim as to who she is. But what a "white-throat child" is, I could not say definitively. I must re-read it. Look at the hypen, the "is," constellate it with "child" - certain fleeting impressions of vulnerability, sensuality, a smallness, cross me. tender, not seasoned (neither black nor tan). racial? yes.
the next two lines tell more, pile on this lower case character. now i have a sense of here0 thrown open, missing, in the corners of our homes, almost abandoned...
til i get to "lay assassin". here's one of those leaps - even in a narrative poem, that other genres flourish once every 50 pages to startle the reader - and which poetry can toss of every couples lines - no big deal. but it certainly forces the reader to re-focus, review, reconsider. this attic founderling is capable of murder, a murder at once sacred and profane ( lay being distinct from secular - lay being opposed to ordained).
jump again - gilda is crippled. she lacks digits, she is retarded in doing, she can not hold or grab.
(not as one with hands can).
yet - switch of voice - switch of case - she is addressed, comanded or implored - to use the hands she does not have, to touch another body, another "me".
hands she doesn't/does have. an impossibility? fuck if i know, this is just the first page...
posted by Kyle at 4:49 PM
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