A Daily Glance
Hugh Tibbey’s
Finish Your Sentence is a fascinating book of formal experiments including s + 7(s), homophonic translations, and diastics. Essentially the book plays with how seed texts filter into new texts or perhaps how any text requires a misreading of past texts (this is starting to sound like Bloom), though here the misreading is ordered through a process. Unlike many books, this one does not seem to offer a commentary on poetry but on interpretation, especially since some of the poems go beyond just rupturing syntax to rupturing basic morphemes. Take, for example, a line like “Gdggddd95554xlo.” The numbers still have meaning, of course, but the letters have been removed from meaningful morphemes. This example is an extreme in the book, but most of the poems seem to play with the layers of interpretation from seed text to mistranslation to new poem.
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