From Old Marble Notebooks

From Old Marble Notebooks (even though the poem is not an excerpt)

1. A bat, a rat, and a cat all came from animals.
2. Ghoti reads fish, remember the lessons?
3. They say finesse for steal, box for hit, some type of way for emotion, steal on for dupe, play for mess with, lit for exciting, bet for okay; they finessed the language.
4. The sentence is the mark of class.
5. I used to not be able to type poetry, or write prose. What’s the difference?
6. It is difficult to write projective verse when you have a respiratory infection.
7. Our dogs barking, are dogs barking generally sound the same.
8. With a stopwatch, a Southern drawl clocks at a normal speed.
9. Say oral, hear aural.
10. Language is the first thing we learn the rules for. All rules are descended from language. This is why books of law are so dense.
11. I was told to never use this as a pronoun; this is outrageous.
12. The silence between lines is deafening.

What did you hear?

13. Words carry weight; weighty words are heavier.
14. The pound sign is a hashtag #meaning.
15. Flip through the channels and you finish on your own: A window to another. The dog ran down the. Buy the miracle so that. The Senate today voted on. The next hot topic of.
16. If someone else said it better, should you bother saying something new, or just using what they said? “Right on,” said Jim Raynor.
17. Do we get to hold onto poems like thoughts? If you write a poem, does someone else own your thoughts?
18. I have never seen a book of poetry printed in anything other than black ink.
19. Does anybody write in dialect anymore?
20. Words can be used to make someone think or feel anything you want; that’s power right there.
21. “It was you who broke my Meissen plate/Breakfast is served with a silver spoon.” These were the first lines of poetry I ever heard that controlled a person’s fate.
22. We kind of forgot about the sublime, except for the band. We’ve never stopped thinking Romantically though.
23. Has poetry ever changed society, or does society simply change poetry? Through all the schools I’ve studied, why does what I write today sound so dramatically different yet so fundamentally the same as poetry written by people long since dead?
24. I think I too like a period. It’s a restful thing.
25. A list poem is a list of things; attach numbers and it’s a list, and a poem.

I quite enjoyed Silliman’s excerpts from The Chinese Notebook. I love how each of the entries actually made me give pause and either come up with an answer or reflectively say, “huh.” Number 7, declaring that the numbered segments were, in fact, lines of poetry, was a demonstrative example of the type of formal exploration employed by the “language poets.” The long-form prose poems, the numbered lists, the minute attention to formal detail, the precise interplay of words in a sentence, the careful crafting of a sentence independent or dependent on the next sentence, in a stanza/paragraph or not; the diction, the words themselves, and the form, as opposed to the content (and especially the confessional), really stood out to me in our reading. I wanted specifically to imitate Silliman’s form in The Chinese Notebook, with some playful jabs at the language we use everyday, as well as maybe some deeper observations. I did also allude to Armantrout and Perelman too (silence and meaning). I used to only write creatively, outside of school, in marble notebooks, hence the title. Remember those from elementary school?

With so much formal experimentation/corruption, how are the nonstandard-looking poems of the language poets actually poems? Silliman says a poem is a poem because we say so; if a poem looks and sounds like a paragraph, or a list, how is it a poem?