Amazing New Clifford Duffy Innovations

posting by Corry Shores
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See more of Clifford Duffy's beautiful innovations. Here is a gorgeous word from a stunning poem, remand:

o ,, n

And here a lovely phrase

at's time's at

See his painting too:

And certainly notice his interactive innovation for this poem. I cannot reproduce it on my blog, so see it here in the poem 'turf'

After the 'of', there is space for the eyes to read, until getting to his time-modulating double commas. We might not notice that there is a cloaked hyperlink, 'war' taking us to another wonderful poem (place your cursor near the last double comma and click). But when I first read it, I did not see it. Yet I felt something in that place where the word was. I felt the immediacy of time, as has been the case lately when I read many of Duffy's works; he has been producing new time experiences. So I wonder, what is our experience of this poem? Does it change how we experience the temporality in that space of the invisible war? Does Duffy create a far greater temporal intensity using this technique? That is my impression. Without knowing of the hidden war, I felt the force of time while my eyes moved over that place. But now knowing it is a link to another poetry-world, it feels like so much more is given birth in that instant my eyes are in that spot. Do you feel it too? In that blank space, another parallel language world is expressing itself implicitly. What separates these worlds is not space, because they intersect the same place. When we look in the mirror and see a person appearing many years older than we had in mind for ourselves, we feel the depth of these many years all in that instant. Time is not the passage from the past to the present, but the feeling of the forces at war between these images. Perhaps when our eyes see both language worlds in the same place, we do not have the feeling that space lies between them, but perhaps forces of time do; we might think, for example, that it will take time for us to go from this poetry world to the hyperlinked one. But we feel ourselves already in that other world, even before going there; we feel that other world implicitly in this sentence. So we feel the time between the two language worlds right there in an instant where we see just a small spaceless point in the motion of the poem. Our space-time warping into this other world is not actualized, it is implicit, we feel ourselves being thrown in that direction, like how a ball spinning on a chain always feels itself being thrown in a straight line away from its circular path.

As Duffy's poems show, language can generate 'lines of escape' or 'lines of flight'. By doing so, we feel ourselves fly-off to another meaning-world, all while remaining within the immediacy of our given experience. So perhaps one way language produces time is by creating these lines of flight to other language worlds, which compresses the time between them into our immediate temporal experience. Do we feel this in Duffy's poems? There are other reasons they create time, but is this at least one of them?