The Daily Glance
John Bennett's Neolipic is an ebook that plays with the sound of words and how slight differences in sound shift the meaning completely. Bennett also plays with how our minds read for a certain trained structure even when that structure is shifted slightly. For example, the first two lines of the first poem are:
ondamatic I could nob the
sandle flume awalkly I
He has retained the pronouns and article, but he's shifted the words. Still, I read through a piece like this looking for the new creations in language as well as what it might say in standard English. That grows complicated in the course of this book since Bennett also uses quite a bit of Spanish. In some of the poems, the languages overlap as if we are watching a brain working in both languages at once write automatically while looking through a somewhat blurry window. Each piece is fascinating, but I'm not sure that whether I'm supposed to do a close reading or follow the example and explore my own language experiments. Ultimately, is the process or the piece the most important part of this book? Whatever the answer is, it's fascinating--even the wonderful book cover.
John Bennett's Neolipic is an ebook that plays with the sound of words and how slight differences in sound shift the meaning completely. Bennett also plays with how our minds read for a certain trained structure even when that structure is shifted slightly. For example, the first two lines of the first poem are:
ondamatic I could nob the
sandle flume awalkly I
He has retained the pronouns and article, but he's shifted the words. Still, I read through a piece like this looking for the new creations in language as well as what it might say in standard English. That grows complicated in the course of this book since Bennett also uses quite a bit of Spanish. In some of the poems, the languages overlap as if we are watching a brain working in both languages at once write automatically while looking through a somewhat blurry window. Each piece is fascinating, but I'm not sure that whether I'm supposed to do a close reading or follow the example and explore my own language experiments. Ultimately, is the process or the piece the most important part of this book? Whatever the answer is, it's fascinating--even the wonderful book cover.
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