Tuesday, June 9, 2009

from Juliana Spahr's The Transformation

Because the town was dirty, whenever they read poems about 
the beauty of the countryside or the rich, dark woods of the
eastern part of the continent or of the other continent, and
islands across the Atlantic, which was all they knew about
poetry because the only poems they read in school were about
stuff like this, poetry made little sense to them.  So then they
found this writing of fragmentation, quotation, disruption, dis-
junction, agrammatical syntax, and so on in an anthology.
This writing was at the time over sixty years old and mainly
written on the continent and the islands across the Atlantic
and yet it felt completely fresh and new and because they were
looking for something that was not a weird environmental lie,
and because this writing of fragmentation, quotation, disrup-
tion, disjunciton, agrammatical syntax, and so on was so weird
it at least didn't seem to be lying in the usual ways and they
clung to it and they felt it was a part of them.

Really what it was was that they felt this writing in their body.
They felt certain sensations, the sensations of interested calm-
ness that happened when their mind and their breath were
working together.  This sensation of interested calmness might
also be called pleasant boredom. There was something about 
the artfully vague repetition of this writing from afar that
pleased them.  It pleased them slightly but not too much and
from this mild stimulation certain thoughts formed in their
head and they felt they could pay attention to these thoughts
and their emerging symbols as much or as little as they wanted.

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