Notes Excerpt #1

“Another element in Rimbaud worth noting is his juxtaposition of extremely sharp yet seemingly disparate and even contradictory descriptive phrases, of removing connecting links, stripping away any narrative to leave one stark image fixed next to another” (Dobyns, 79). Ah, see, even though we’ve not read Rimbaud, we can still level some invective against his brand of poetry. Those connective links of which Dobyns’s speaks, after all, are of what sort of nature? They are syntactical. They construct, or rather deploy, the sense-making and momentum-accruing techniques of prose but are not themselves prosaic—the “juxtaposition of extremely sharp yet seemingly disparate and even contradictory descriptive phrases” prevents that sound or feel.