The Daily Glance
Thomas Fink's clarity and other poems plays with a variety of forms and attempts to push us back from that which we think we know about the world around us. We start with shaped verse, though the shapes are not clear. Some seem like letters, but other are more like chairs. The narrative of the shaped pieces seems clear at first, but it jumps as you follow it. These shapes are followed by some open forms pieces and then a series of "Nonce Sonnet[s]." I don't think I can adequately describe them (and I don't feel like coding them on Blogger), but these pieces are fascinating to me because they retain and explode the sonnet form and at the same time they create a new look for the form. By that, I mean that they seem like shaped poems, but they have replaced the square form of the sonnet with something new. Past them in the middle of the book, Fink gives us a dialogue between three people about the arts. In the dialogue, Fink exclaims, "As a Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist, I learn variously and repeatedly of the self's insubstantially." Well, does this mean that the self that we see in the book is a hollow self? In other words, have we been reading a book with an open center, with no bottom in the Shakespearean sense? After the dialogue, the rest of the book contains various types of poems, including more shaped pieces, a hay(na)ku, and some expanded hay(na)kus. The expanded ones retain the feel of the hay(na)ku as it opens with its one, two, three form, but they do not follow the form.
how to maestro? Chance
must. The chance. Uniquely,
ungainly. To someone's disgust.
Whose fluency will you
see there?
Don't
stop
tinkering with the borrowed.
We can't peel publics.
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