The Orphaned Line: trembling

Stories and poems

"The metaphoric image of 'orphan lines' is a contrivance of the detached onlooker to whom the verbal art of continuous correspondences remains aesthetically alien. Orphan lines in poetry of pervasive parallels are a contradiction in terms, since whatever the status of a line, all its structure and functions are indissolubly interlaced with the near and distant verbal environment, and the task of linguistic analysis is to disclose the levels of this coaction. When seen from the inside of the parallelistic system, the supposed orphanhood, like any other componential status, turns into a network of multifarious compelling affinities.'
Roman JAKOBSON, "Grammatical Parallelism and its Russian Facet", Language, 42/2, 1966, pp. 399-429, p. 428-429

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Monday, August 8, 2011

Carpe Diem

As an obvious rejoinder to my reflections on death, I wanted to post a poem about seizing the day; I couldn't find one of my own. Then I realized, all my poems are the result moments that I seized, a kind of verbal carpe diem, so perhaps they never need to address the issue. Maybe that is poetry, seizing the day, in words.