a new measure (poetry report)

I came across  Stroke by Stroke  in the wake of reading The Wilds of Poetry , an anthology assembled by David Hinton, a poet and translator of Chinese poetry. In the introduction, he calls attention to writing’s pictographic origin, which ideograms maintained but alphabetic languages abandoned.  Whereas pictographic language “manifest[s] a direct connection to the empirical world,” alphabetic abstraction connects letters to speech sounds, resulting in “words that have an arbitrary relationship to the things they name.” This explains a whole cosmology for Hinton, whereby “consciousness as open and integral to natural process [as in Taoism] was replaced by an immaterial soul ontologically separate from and outside of material reality.” Instead of consciousness being the same as everything else, it is the Ego’s, a detached and reflexive entity that is not the same as the things it thinks about. Alphabetic writing, which “arbitrarily relat[es]” to the things it names, ac...

I entered without words  is comprised of “landscape-oriented” poems, in which drops of one or two words are spread across the page. The poems have a very singular look that’s neither “concrete” (the shapes are still determined by syntax, inviting you to start at the top left of the page and read left to right) nor “Projective” (that’s too determined by the “breath” of a subject). There are some similarities to ideograms, but ideograms are not alphabetic and are a kind of  “brushstroke.”   Some of the words are printed in bold type. Gladding states that these are entry points into the field of each poem. So, for example, one might read “in my sickness the sky kept spinning” in the following poem, but the idea is to also range across the poem and read other possibilities: When I go over this poem, I also read a statement of being “amazed at how all that could be firmament kept spinning.” All that is firmament is actually spinning, at the atomic level. You also need to ...