The Daily Glance
Lisa Lubasch's Twenty-One After Days is beautifully constructed and full of language exploration. In fact, thinking about the logic of language and of cognition seems to be the overriding theme of the book, and since I'm fairly interested in linguistics and the question of language systems, I found her personal exploration of the questions fascinating. Take the first poem, for example:
The one thing I found a little awkward in her work was her use of the prose poem. See the one above. She uses dashes to create sounds in the lines, but many of the poems in the collection look like more traditional free verse lyrics, and these feel like them as well, with the dash just functioning essentially as a line break. I'm not trying to be critical of her form choice with these, for the pieces, at least for me, read much the same as the other poems in the book. I just wonder why she picked the prose form.
Having just read her excellent translation of Paul Eluard (Green Integer), I was happy to read through some of her personal pieces, and I found that the pieces pulled me largely due to the sounds of the lines.
Lisa Lubasch's Twenty-One After Days is beautifully constructed and full of language exploration. In fact, thinking about the logic of language and of cognition seems to be the overriding theme of the book, and since I'm fairly interested in linguistics and the question of language systems, I found her personal exploration of the questions fascinating. Take the first poem, for example:
lampshades will admit of the spectacular -- are they hosts to other things? -- greedy narratives -- where the poem boils over -- rings on the bed, so the surrounding bets are off -- influence may also be a wander of sorts -- clandestine raveler -- these mincing ways that words go inIs she really talking about lampshades? Is this about the internal logic of narratives? Inheritance of narratives? Or is it about the syntactical dancing of meaning as words shift contexts? I'm not sure how Lubasch would answer these questions, but her work definitely makes one think about them.
The one thing I found a little awkward in her work was her use of the prose poem. See the one above. She uses dashes to create sounds in the lines, but many of the poems in the collection look like more traditional free verse lyrics, and these feel like them as well, with the dash just functioning essentially as a line break. I'm not trying to be critical of her form choice with these, for the pieces, at least for me, read much the same as the other poems in the book. I just wonder why she picked the prose form.
Having just read her excellent translation of Paul Eluard (Green Integer), I was happy to read through some of her personal pieces, and I found that the pieces pulled me largely due to the sounds of the lines.
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