there are, like the freeway of my love, two separate means of approaching poems that my reading brain works with. the first is saturation; the second is balance. now the fact that sandburg's lines have no balance to my ear, or possibly my understanding, is interesting because they are so saturate. up until chicago poems, i'd always kind of assumed that balance and saturation went hand in hand (which was materially aided by the fact that i hadn't, ahrem, discovered that the term "balance," which i swear to god i just started using as i'm using it right now, was supposed to be a component of "saturation," until approximately, time-wise, the second at which i began this paragraph). but sandburg muddies his lines with everything and the kitchen sink--i mean, i swear to god, it's all in there. there's "it" at the most unpropitious spot possible; there's a wierdly vague word like "tides" in a place where the object has already been so described as to need no further clarification; he throws in "all" all the time... sucked i less, i'd actually get out my slender dover publication and take a crack at specificity, but, as shakespeare says, "time and the elements tumpty-tum," hence onward and a rousing upward. (and by the way, for someone who's set my face against dichotomies i seem to discover a lot of them. i guess they're like paring knives--useful for stuff upon occasion. lazy occasion).
so that throws off the balance, which seems to rest in a strange place between meaning and sound--i mean, with a word like "all," the habits of its usage in language, the place in which it usually sits, the context in which it usually stands in for something else in a certain type of poetry universally eschewed by all my parts, in short, in its accoutrements or possibly its genre, i suppose one could say that one hears all of these parts, bits, and baggages when he or she reads the word in a certain place in a line, and one makes certain assumptions and draws certain conclusions, to wit a reaction such as, aw man, sandburg, you dumbass, what'd you put that there for? it ain't cleanly, in short. it's like eating meat on a dairy plate. it's like eating pork loin on a dairy plate. it's all the wierder because he's got sonorities aplenty, and sonorities are where i thought that the saturation resided.
and it's not that his poems aren't saturate. that's the wierdest part, the part, i suppose, that i don't get. i mean, eliot had all his bits and pieces (pun really not intended), but they were incised into a line that could clean-cut plate glass. whereas reconciling sandburg's topic with his line, his line with his sonority, is an exercise in postmodernism that those people who killed themselves in time for hale-bopp would be proud of. it's a broken saturation, in short. it doesn't function as a unit. but pile all the pieces on top of one another and they achieve a something, a nature--the way we think the world would look if time didn't exist, just piece after piece, distinct, brilliant, and able to be swallowed like athena in zeus, zeus-rock in chronos.
in short, it's based on a premise that i find kinda alien...but there are times at which it works, and the whole structure of the poem bursts on me like a rainbow, jizzing. usually the reds whack hardest.
No comments:
Post a Comment