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A truly marvellous poem at Clifford Duffy's Fictions 4: and
Clifford Duffy. and
(Thanks very much, Clifford Duffy)
(Thanks very much, Clifford Duffy)
This poem should probably not be analyzed. I am unable to explain its magic. But I do not want to miss the opportunity to learn more about language by means of examining certain things in this poem.
The first thing I notice is the motion. I make gentle leaps from one line to the next, as if my eyes take flight and drop floatingly to the next line below. The gentleness I think comes from the phonetics. The sounds seem to reflect and allow us to move in a glide from one word or line to the next. Notice also the distribution, the space we feel as we sail between lines. Consider the melody it makes. For me, I hear the longer gap from the first to the second line as a somewhat profound drop in register. Now also consider the rhythm of the word stress. We might say it has a fairly consistent up-and-down flow to it. But notice also the speed changes. The lines toward the bottom are closer together, and so we read them in faster succession. For me, these rhythmic variations in speed also raise the pitch of the sound that the bottom three lines make. So going from lines three to four, I notice the most raising of pitch, for example, and these lines also happen to have the greatest speed of transition. Moving from line four to the final line five, our eyes need to move backwards, which slows the motion down a little, and like a plane slowing to land, the poem feels like it naturally slides gracefully to its ending stop.
In line four, there is an interesting temporalization, the extra space between 'ladies' and 'in care'. We might say we feel a tension in that gap, like a holding-back of language's saying. But is that so? What about the fact that all throughout, for the most part, up to that point, we felt a continuous flow? And yet here in the gap, the continuity is broken. But we still feel the inertia of the motion even after it breaks, like how when a car stops suddenly, we feel ourselves thrown forward even after the car fully halts. In other words, there is an intensity at work in that gap. In one way, our minds might aim to contract that gap by trying to bring the broken parts back together into the poem's flow, as if we could just forget the pause. But in another way, we feel the fullness of the intensities of that moment. So in the crack of that contraction is an enormous depth of poetic time. Then instead of thinking of this gap as having a tension created by an absence of text, we might instead think of it as an explosion of time and sense, coming from a singularity, namely, the contracted but profoundly deep crack in the flow.
Another remarkable part of my experience of this poem is the phonetic bifurcations. For example, in 'fluttering woof', I hear this conjointly as 'fluttering woof' and 'fluttering wolf', both somehow simultaneously, which is possible when we read it in our minds and have a split consciousness at that moment. Then there is a more orthographic and sense bifurcation in the final line. My eyes see both 'knight' with the 'k', but also in 'knight' is the word 'night', and I read it both ways simultaneously. This takes the interpretative machinery of our mind into two directions at once. These are also intensities. The text is intending to go different ways all at once, all in the same space or time, in a sense.
When language stands-out to us, whether because it is profoundly meaningful or aesthetically affective (or both), could this be largely on account of intensities such as the ones we analyzed here? If we think of our favorite line of poetry or our favorite part of a novel, can we attribute its power to its intensive forces?
The first thing I notice is the motion. I make gentle leaps from one line to the next, as if my eyes take flight and drop floatingly to the next line below. The gentleness I think comes from the phonetics. The sounds seem to reflect and allow us to move in a glide from one word or line to the next. Notice also the distribution, the space we feel as we sail between lines. Consider the melody it makes. For me, I hear the longer gap from the first to the second line as a somewhat profound drop in register. Now also consider the rhythm of the word stress. We might say it has a fairly consistent up-and-down flow to it. But notice also the speed changes. The lines toward the bottom are closer together, and so we read them in faster succession. For me, these rhythmic variations in speed also raise the pitch of the sound that the bottom three lines make. So going from lines three to four, I notice the most raising of pitch, for example, and these lines also happen to have the greatest speed of transition. Moving from line four to the final line five, our eyes need to move backwards, which slows the motion down a little, and like a plane slowing to land, the poem feels like it naturally slides gracefully to its ending stop.
In line four, there is an interesting temporalization, the extra space between 'ladies' and 'in care'. We might say we feel a tension in that gap, like a holding-back of language's saying. But is that so? What about the fact that all throughout, for the most part, up to that point, we felt a continuous flow? And yet here in the gap, the continuity is broken. But we still feel the inertia of the motion even after it breaks, like how when a car stops suddenly, we feel ourselves thrown forward even after the car fully halts. In other words, there is an intensity at work in that gap. In one way, our minds might aim to contract that gap by trying to bring the broken parts back together into the poem's flow, as if we could just forget the pause. But in another way, we feel the fullness of the intensities of that moment. So in the crack of that contraction is an enormous depth of poetic time. Then instead of thinking of this gap as having a tension created by an absence of text, we might instead think of it as an explosion of time and sense, coming from a singularity, namely, the contracted but profoundly deep crack in the flow.
Another remarkable part of my experience of this poem is the phonetic bifurcations. For example, in 'fluttering woof', I hear this conjointly as 'fluttering woof' and 'fluttering wolf', both somehow simultaneously, which is possible when we read it in our minds and have a split consciousness at that moment. Then there is a more orthographic and sense bifurcation in the final line. My eyes see both 'knight' with the 'k', but also in 'knight' is the word 'night', and I read it both ways simultaneously. This takes the interpretative machinery of our mind into two directions at once. These are also intensities. The text is intending to go different ways all at once, all in the same space or time, in a sense.
When language stands-out to us, whether because it is profoundly meaningful or aesthetically affective (or both), could this be largely on account of intensities such as the ones we analyzed here? If we think of our favorite line of poetry or our favorite part of a novel, can we attribute its power to its intensive forces?
Clifford Duffy. and. Fictions 4, dated 16-April-2011, captured here 17-April-2011.
http://fictions4.blogspot.com/2011/04/and.html
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