The first time I ever read any poetry by Marcelin Pleynet, a translation I believe by Serge Gavronsky, I remember having the reaction that the post-structuralist poet (also, in his day job, an art critic) demonstrated exactly how one arrive at might good poetry using a discourse that was distinctively prose. It’s a much trickier process than it might at first seem.

 

I hadn’t thought of Pleynet in months, if not years, until I came across an excerpt from Jacqueline Waters’ The Garden of Eden a College in the latest issue of The Poker. The work has an angular energy to it that you feel even in that paratactic blip in the title itself. It’s like a spark or a jump cut in an otherwise “straight” strip of film. The stanzas move across the page – the format overall is too large to fully present here – ranging between individual lines that appear addressed if not to the reader, then to an Other for whom the reader might stand, and longer strophes that balance impulses with great precision:

 

Poem on the endeavor
to emancipate the soul
from daydreams, hello

Thought, which you might seek out again
and consume in opposition
to these small snow-powdered roots
taped to the hotel guard
                      friendly with me
                      frivolous with me
     sent by a rat to pick the coat
     with the feel of being coaxed
     to accept an unpleasant ruse . . .

 

(Ellipsis in the original & I’m guessing on the positioning of the left-hand margin for frivolous – it comes right at a page break – &, thus, with all that follows.)

 

These sentences build carefully. Note how everything before that first comma is a complex noun phrase, the addressee. It was the words emancipate & snow-powdered that first caused my eye, drifting over the various texts of the journal to slow down & start reading with more attention. The same kind of paratactic spark that is visible in the title happens big time right at the point when Waters introduces the two lines that start with italics. Each of these lines as well as the first one following force the reader to decide – am I still in the same sentence? I don’t think there is necessarily a wrong, or even worse answer here, but the palpability of the question itself is a major part of the linebreak’s effect. Indeed, as this stanza demonstrates not once, but twice, Waters knows how to maximize the pause & turn implicit in a comma.

 

While this isn’t the sound-centered poetry I associated earlier this week with Louis Zukofsky or even Jack Collom, certainly “to these small snow-powdered roots,” constructed as it is from all those vowels & soft consonants leading up to the explosion of the p in powdered, then ending on the ts after the double o, demonstrates total assurance with the devices at hand. It’s great fun to read someone who can handle form with such grace.