I am reading Anne Carson’s Plainwater — Essays and Poetry, Part IV: The Life of Towns and pondering her deliberate sabotage of punctuation. Every line begins with the old habit of capitals and tends with a period without regard to syntax.
Emily Town
Riches in a little room.
Is a phrase that haunts.
Her since the mineral of you.
Left.
Snow or a library.
Or a band of angels.
With a message is.
Not what.
It meant to.
Her.
It strikes me as an exercise suggestive of translation from the mind of a classical scholar, requiring us to piece together the fragments written in an alien grammar into our common language.
There is a clear (to me) allusion to Emily Dickinso, writing in her little room about her youthful suitors or her God or both. She had an oceanic heart, embracing everything she touched. This is the deeper Emily, looking for missed love in all the wrong places, in nature and in her God, and doing it beautifully, finding solace in nature and everyday but lying in ved some nights without a pen in her hand dreaming of wild nights. Approaching Dickenson’s grammar and subject as one approaches Sappho, fragments of a life of longing for an absent love.
Fragments of Grammar and Longing
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Trampoline, Unlikely Stories, Peauxdunque Review, LMNL Anthology, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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