Typing up the Muriel Rukeyser poem the other day, I reminded myself of the salutary functions of typing up somebody else’s poem as a step on the way to understanding the text itself. Part of this is a sort of magic – simply by repeating the process of typing these words in this order, one duplicates the process of the author & gains some intuitive sense for the feel of those words as they roll out across the screen or page. Part of it is simply having to type every word forces one to acknowledge the roll(s) being played by those that appear on the surface to be the least important – articles, for example.
As it happens, I discovered, when typing the poem, that my single most favorite moment was the one-word sentence “Airport.” One might argue that it’s there strictly to pad out the line, but it’s rare to find that at the start of a line & so otherwise unmotivated by the actual sense of the text itself. Rather, it stands on its own nominal integrity, not unlike the way nouns are used in the work of Larry Eigner.
In the case of “The Road,” typing served a second salutary function. Tho the volumes in the American Poets Project are slightly larger than mass market paperbacks, 4½ inches across, 7½ inches high, their generous 9-point type size combines with the narrow page to create a text with very little white space – indeed, if it weren’t for run-on lines, the text would be nearly as dense on the page as prose. In that tight frame, you can’t really see the poem, certainly not as clearly as in the version I put up on my blog Monday.
You can tell when a book designer either doesn’t read poetry, or else doesn’t “get” it. But it seems ironic, to say the least, that the American Poets Project (whose title is almost as pompously overstated as that of the parent Library of America series) should be such an obvious example. Doubly so given that “the American Poets Project is published with a gift in memory of James Merrill.” Well meaning, ill spent. The one real justification these books might claim is to return a disappeared poet to broader circulation. In the case of Kenneth Fearing, the series can make that claim without much difficulty. But what about a poet broadly available already, such as Williams?
