Any other poetry blogs out there?
I promised a rant, and god knows Ron Silliman's blog
provides plenty of opportuity for ranting--especially the comments
here and
here--
but last night I took Greg Williamson's
Errors in the Script to dinner with me at
Spinnakers and, in between the delicious Oysters
Rockefeller and the barely overdone but still quite good marlin, I was nearly blinded by this poem:
| VI. PHOTO ALBUM WITH VISITING COUPLE MISFOLDING AFGHAN |
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| There was a story in this book, signed "Luv." |
| My friend, he saw it as a goof; his wife, |
| She thought it was cute. It'd be a record of |
| A Möbius strip, the "story of our life," |
| The birthdays, weddings, homes, reunions, showers, |
| Where every chapter's end is a fresh start, |
| With space for "new adventures" we'd call "ours," |
| As if life were a book, as if it's art, |
| As if our real future weren't a grave |
| And we're the heroes, lovable, sublime, |
| Misunderstanding. That book's now just another page. |
| In some romanace that started "once upon a time." |
It's one of a series of 26 "Double Exposures," each a technical marvel, interleaved iambic pentameter couplets
that can be read together, as a single poem, or separately. In a few, the artifice seems to be there for its own
sake (it is a really neat trick), but here the three stories build from the husband's blithe naïveté
through the wife's almost lighthearted cynicism to the heartbreaking vision of the endless failure of
hope and love, a faiure no less real for the fact that those who fail are in fact the "heroes, lovable, sublime..."
12:51:38 PM 
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