There is a passage in “The New Sentence” that I think I may have misread. But I liked my misreading, found it liberating. So I’ll stick by it.
“Contained in the sixth definition is the notation that in grammar, a sentence is either a proposition, question, command, ore\ request, containing subject and predicate, though one of the may be absent by means of ellipsis” (64).
This notion of absence, of delay. It makes me excited the way Dickinson’s dashes and Stein’s periods do. Then I started thinking of how words can come to function as grammatical markers. I think of the experience of reading Three Lives by Stein, the way words come to function as periods, places of rest and recuperation around which revolution takes place.
It seems that Silliman is after a syntax that confers this pause, this reflection that grammatical markers, dashes and periods, and words in repetition to the level of the sentence. He marks in a Coolidge poem, as a commendable achievement, that “the length of sentences and the use of the period are now wholly rhythmic” (88). Silliman is after an intrinsic measure for a particular work of language that does not rely on conventions in order to create torque. He wants the “poetic form [to move] into the interiors of prose” (89). He is concerned with the logic of the content, the argument, and the logic of the syntax.
Silliman offers a definition of language, from Wittgenstien, as “a manifestation or transformation of thought” (70). The poetic seems to want to treat this “or” as an “and.” It is, like Stein said, about going around the inside of a thing, of space so that the to know is a transformation, an exchange of energy, and experience. So I guess part of the notion about controlling the syllogistic movement is about delay the gratification of a complete sentence, about delaying the name that renders uninteresting, still, complete. Controlling the syllogistic movement is like setting out a trail. It is not just important that all the parts are there. But also that there is enough space in some places for wandering and in others for hitting heads and scraping knees. And that attention is given to the fact that water is appreciated more in a desert, that glass might be more interesting with flaws, or in the reflections and overlap, or maybe chasms.
End ramble.
1 comment:
Mollie, with some expansion and revision, this could be a terrific essay.
Yes, "an intrinsic measure ... that does not rely on conventions in order to create torque." In fact, I wonder if that might go toward a working definition of torque itself: a variety of poetic "turning," twisting, torsion, indirection, etc., that is not reducible to a normative prosodic or syntactical effect. The problem is that most such techniques can be analyzed and normalized, so that for instance now the New Sentence is itself a convention. So torque may be like a snake that is always shedding its skin, and the old skin that is left behind is the normative convention: meter, rhyme, recognizable modes of enjambment, and so forth.
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