Monday, April 30, 2007

For instances ("...abandon syntax as a lark...")



i

Slipping lark-wise. Syntax
is body — it's dial syntax, people

syntax, ticklish to my ship. Your
body is could nor sometime

out for glish or a signal.
A verb with lower parts do

the very or warm. Exactly
purse and pray precisely. When

numbing it right, order
parts, the first not there.





ii

There's blue — may
the chips fall in numbers. And

we went, there
of a however. We

go — up like abandon —
loop low by lures, low

as larks. Look still and scribbled
to mouthing company. And

I was sparky and lost, and I
was not a verb. My

May bed — hackneyed and flushed
— it's the morn or sometime.





iii

O the sky I conquer
to the flames forms all

beyond — flunges. The thing
that out a sight does feature.







[An "instance" in which I begin with a portion of a line from Bruce Andrews. The full sentence, from I Don't Have Any Paper, So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) is: "Bugs inspect the abandon syntax as a lark — sudden pockets pout end duly drought" (61).

I picked this passage because Andrews' work has been particularly important to me, and because this line (or portion of a line, rather) nearly sums up his poetic practice, focused as it is on an "abandon syntax." But for Andrews, this practice isn't a "lark" — on the contrary, his treatment of "syntax as a demolition derby" works to "both construct and disrupt [the] social order," and to "suggest a
social undecidability" (as he puts it in "Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis").]


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