a new measure (poetry report)

  God Wave  is “a book-length prose poem with no end punctuation,” composed of 51+ pages of 31 lines justified to both margins, with no capitalization other than “I.” Reading it, I sought some instrumental analogue for reference. Repetitive, muscular, dissonant alto saxophone (such as Evan Parker’s  Conic Sections )? However, I found that music was not a useful analogue. Music has texture and rhythm, whereas Lara’s work is “no material.”   “No material” writing, in the context of  God Wave , aspires to divest language of referentiality in favor of what Lara terms in an  interview  “the purely creative aspect of the purely creative aspect of language.” Thus, whatever memories and judgments come up in the work are not the reason  for  the writing; instead, they are the material becoming no-material, vehicles for the words’ flight towards a pure point of generativity:   I now address the subtitular epitome of divine relenting the restless l...