I just finished reading Mark Weiss' _32 Poems_ (Chax Press). I literally read the chapbook out loud in front of a microphone capturing the words for a computer voice program. The program usually distorts the words that I read so much that they hardly appear like my original words, so I figured I would use what showed up as the start for my own writing. Weiss' work seems like snaps of his life, almost like a journal. It's like he went around with a pen capturing whatever appeared to his mind, like quick photo snaps. The snaps could be of gulls, the landscape, people, or whatever appeared in front of him. As a reader, the snaps I found most interesting connected with my own life, as if I recognized my own scenes in his writing. Besides that, some of the poems have a nice lyric quality, with line breaks that are quite neat. Take, for example,
heads shaved, their
own world, a bathtub, a
doubtful plaything. She
paid attention to her friends' children she thought it
fine for a child to bite the dog she was an
unripe fig, a
flower, an
unbroken seed. (23)
There are also some single lines that stand out on their own—the kind of lines that you look back on a wonder, did I write that?
heads shaved, their
own world, a bathtub, a
doubtful plaything. She
paid attention to her friends' children she thought it
fine for a child to bite the dog she was an
unripe fig, a
flower, an
unbroken seed. (23)
There are also some single lines that stand out on their own—the kind of lines that you look back on a wonder, did I write that?
Comments