Conversations
by Jim Leftwich, Olchar E Lindsann, & John M. Bennett
from Shat on a tool (J. M. Bennett, Luna Bisonte Prod. 2024)
Jim Leftwich & Olchar E. Lindsann
And also sat on a stool…
The first thing I noticed in your shat on a tool are the gaps in words,
missing letters, and then I noticed that these letters are present, but
displaced.
The letters floating detached from their baselines insist on an
abnormally active process of meaning-building on the part of the
reader.
The flow of reading, let’s say, is disrupted, and not so much by the
absences in the words as by the misplaced presences of the floating
letters.
Poetry has always slowed the reading process, but this letter-
displacement device forces us to think not only about the fact of our
reading being slowed, but we also cannot avoid thinking about the
manner in which this is achieved.
Increasingly I think, we will want poems that insist on being poems,
written one human choice at a time, and read the same way,
unavoidably, one human choice at a time. – JL
I also like those words disintegrating before my eyes; it’s what i feel is
happening whenever i really read a poem. in the disintegration is
more meaning, or a sense of there being meaning, a step toward the
noisy silence that is a poem – JMB
I understand that “disintegrating” notion. Finding meaning isn’t a
matter of translating the poem into prose, it’s a matter of paying
attention to what the poet is doing with the language – JL
yes! very much so – JMB
Poetry should be taught that way. JL
re yr comment about reading poetry not “being a matter of translating
the poem into prose”- that goes for translating into a different
language as well. it cannot be done, really – one only gets the “prose”
sense of the work…. – JMB
Translation of poetry from one language to another has to be
impossible. We’re fortunate to have the good ones that we have. – JL
Olchar E. Lindsann & John M. Bennett
Yr new cycle of poems here beg for two voices. The letters falling out
of their lines, as it were, implies a sort of gravitational pull , as if the
bottom line exerts its control over the other elements (following
which analogy it would presumably be a dense centre, making the
reversed words visitants from the other hemis[here…)
Or else, they drop out of their words into the void beneath, as in the
Plinko game on The Price is Right…
But then they form their own pattern, overlain by the lines, especially
due to the size difference. Or like a field of letteral stars with words
nebulizing against it.
And/or in others, that layered quality feels like a fractured utterance
blistering over an underlying state, cf. the a g ó n i c o & d r o w n – OL
Thx for yr comments re them peoms – all on arget, yes. I also think
of them as if they represent the words dissolving, disappearing. That
dissolution may be where they’re headed, in fact – Ahoy, Blank Page!
And for 2 voices, or even 3, yes, with the voices on the fallen letters
being fainter, perhaps? or strangled? – JMB
