Stereophonic Discrepancy

Low's Secret Name is coming in heavy on the bass and light on the treble. Still as sadcore as ever, of course.

Spent the morning (after classes, errands) with Bishop and the afternoon with Plath. Both have singularities in their speech that make neither one sound anything like anyone else. They are only themselves. Bishop shares some of Lowell's plain-spokenness, which quality, also as in Lowell, is de-rhythm-ified to transcend common speech into a district of speech that is most uncommon. Common speech chipped and smelted and refined into speech like some variety of sterling silver, is one awkward way to put it. And Plath reels from simile to simile - also often couched in formalish metrics, which are enjambed the hell out of until that fact is hard to see, like thus:

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz. A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

- from "Cut"

Which is thoroughgoingly great. Plath, and Bishop too, have voices that are completely their own;in Plath there's a unified dark consciousness that through consistently arresting imagery and a maintained tambor of bleak reflection that make the jumps less jarring, and the poems themselves cohere.

All of which is on my mind not merely 1) for the upcoming exam but also 2) due to Friday's viewing of "Ray," wherein Jamie Foxx / Ray Charles aw-shucks to Bea that he can sound like this and that blues / jazz / country player but can't quite yet sound like himself, to which I can relate, being able to mime your Goldbarths and McGraths with a reasonable amount of success, but as to when this work of mine will stop being imitation and will start sounding unlike those I follow / unwittingly parody,
and to 3) this desire & need I have to turn this MFA exam project into something more than it its intended to be, namely a manifesto on the poetics of Post-postmodernity. As big a fan as I've been of pmod in fiction (I read each page of the "Rainbow", thanks, and Mr. Pynchon do I have some questions for you), I've never bought into it as a viable poetic method. Language Poetry? Solipsism. A Big Step Backward to the elitism of the French Symbolists. I sniff at it. However necessary a movement it may have been - as a counterweight to the other Step Backward of the New Formalists, or as a reductio ad absurdum of contemporary free verse, pick your poison - I do not believe that it represents the direction poetry might & should travel. It's not the sort of poetics that can best capture the modern American / international condition. "That boy was our last hope," scions and critics like to say of their darling movements, poets, and poems. I say, "No. There is another."

Which is a post for another time. It was shockingly cold, taking out the week's garbage. Two trains whistled by at dusk. The dogs fought, but once again it was only a pretense to getting closer. There is more water in the glass than I can drink in a night.