The Daily Glance
Aaron Kunin's The Sore Throat & Other Poems is a book that makes me wonder which is more important, the process or the poems created. Kunin tells us in a "Note" that he has limited the number of words that he is using to 170 in the first section and 200 in the second section. This limitation of the vocabulary creates a choral feel to the poems because the language repeats, and since he is also responding to/translating the work of other writers, we get a sense of repeating vocubulary and repeating literary texts (because we hear others' lines in his work). In all, he meditates on many aspects of language use, and really this book feel like a response to contemporary linguistics.
The throat is sore for a word. It is sore
with word-desire, desire for the word "I."
--I am not a word. "I" is an other!
I myself am a word.
These lines contain quite a bit about the debate that has occured in poetry, philosophy, and linguistics over the past fifty years, and Kunin manages to explore these topics with his limited language use.
One thing that I found troubling in this book was based on the "Note," for in it Kunin tells us that he believes poetry should be made from that which you are most ashamed of, but to be honest, if this poetry is what Kunin is most ashamed of, then he's not ashamed of very much. There were no deep secrets or embarassing scenarios spilled out before us, and I felt slightly swindled because of that.
Aaron Kunin's The Sore Throat & Other Poems is a book that makes me wonder which is more important, the process or the poems created. Kunin tells us in a "Note" that he has limited the number of words that he is using to 170 in the first section and 200 in the second section. This limitation of the vocabulary creates a choral feel to the poems because the language repeats, and since he is also responding to/translating the work of other writers, we get a sense of repeating vocubulary and repeating literary texts (because we hear others' lines in his work). In all, he meditates on many aspects of language use, and really this book feel like a response to contemporary linguistics.
The throat is sore for a word. It is sore
with word-desire, desire for the word "I."
--I am not a word. "I" is an other!
I myself am a word.
These lines contain quite a bit about the debate that has occured in poetry, philosophy, and linguistics over the past fifty years, and Kunin manages to explore these topics with his limited language use.
One thing that I found troubling in this book was based on the "Note," for in it Kunin tells us that he believes poetry should be made from that which you are most ashamed of, but to be honest, if this poetry is what Kunin is most ashamed of, then he's not ashamed of very much. There were no deep secrets or embarassing scenarios spilled out before us, and I felt slightly swindled because of that.
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