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A Myopic Poetry Series event
Sunday, May 30 at Myopic Books
The fundamental unit of these poems appears to be the sentence. Ward makes long lovely sentences that adhere to the rules of syntax—although they grow convoluted the different "parts" seem to be in the right "places." The sentences reliably work themselves out, fulfilling the formal demands made by grammatical logic, and in this way they gain closure, but the completed sentences don't produce meaning in any traditional sense; they don't provide the closure of a comprehensible message.
"There's a big residual noon in the alphabet"
"The esophagus works like a phone book interior / it owns the fact that it can't be described"
"The ribcage opened so crystal comes out"
These poems seem to produce a sort of elegant nonsense of the Ashbery variety, although Ward eschews some of Ashbery's other strategies: where Ashbery commonly shuffles rapidly between various discourse modes, Ward's mode remains essentially stable (I'd describe it as gently lyric); where Ashbery's taste in words runs towards the omnivorous, Ward's circle of inclusion is drawn more tightly (he seems to favor words that have generally sensual connotations, or which are associated with traditional poetic thematics such as nature or the body)
"I am lifting my hand that it not become glass"
"Close your eyes, for that's a lovely way to be"
"We grew tinder in yards of warm grasses"
"For now, the most delicate film rides the heat"
Labels: poetry_commentary
Monday, May 31, 2004
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