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hello dear hearts -

jared, like we talked about on the phone, i have a hard time thinking about couplets - i especially am not really getting my head around what writing an entire poem in couplets would mean. it's hard to think about what something means w/out something else for it to push off against. but for that reason i like your idea (also discussed on the phone) of the couplet as a good home for localized chaos. that is, because of the space around it and its appearance of orderliness, it carries and sets off strange, unaccountable moments of language/idea very well. like dark spots in the middle of glintiness.

we were also talking about the opposite kind of thing, which i've been interested in lately: big rough patches of tumbling, disorderly language, with little clear bits or jokes in the middle. not that the clear parts or silly parts would be placed exactly - i think the fun part of the idea to me is that those parts would be different for every reader. and that they emerge from the big language tumbles (little glints in big dark) just on the principle that something has to glint, relatively; something engages the attention most because your eyes/brain go somewhere. then hopefully behind the hook of reading 1 there's a bigger (less shiny?) hook on reading 2. thinking about this makes me want to ask jared, and others, how planned working with form is for you. my understanding isn't that you (js) were writing with couplets for a particular effect, but that you wound up writing in couplets and wondered what it said about couplets that this group of poems went toward them. that's more how i work anyway. which is kind of weirdly backwards, huh? like doing an experiment, getting a result, and then having to do more experiments to figure out what the result is. maybe that's why i like horoscopes...they kind of seem like equally backwards experiments....

anyway, i've already rambled far afield, but the gist is it's easier for me to think about couplets when i think of a poem reacting against them, or expanding and contracting from them. (by the way, on those lines, i looked at 'measuring' just now and noticed that you didn't write any of those poems _exclusively_ in couplets - the closest is all couplets but ends in a tercet. hmmmm...) i was looking at some d.h. lawrence and trying to figure out how couplets interact with the rhetoric. he seems to like to start out with couplets. i feel like they have a thump of conclusiveness to him that he thinks is funny. that makes him want to repeat them (or their sense) with something added that then begins to push him on to flights of idea. then he brings himself down to earth in more couplets, which have the thump again of a stated idea, often something common-sensical or very pronounced ("this is _my_ idea"). then he pushes off from them again. something interesting w/that - he begins on couplets much more than he ends on them, they're like seeds. here's a bit from "medlars and sorb-apples" to illustrate all this abstraction:

"Medlars and Sorb-Apples (D.H. Lawrence from _Birds, Beasts, and Flowers_)

I love you, rotten,
Delicious rottenness.

I love to suck you out from your skins
So brown and soft and coming suave,
So morbid, as the Italians say.

What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavour
Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay:
Stream within stream.

Something of the same flavour as Syracusan muscat wine
Or vulgar Marsala.

Though even the word Marsala will smack of preciosity
Soon in the pussy-foot West.

What is it?
What is it, in the grape-turning-raisin,
In the medlar, in the sorb-apple,
Wineskins of brown morbidity,
Autumnal excrementa;
What is it that reminds us of white gods?

Gods nude as blanched nut-kernals,
Strangely, half-sinisterly fresh-fragrant
As if with sweat,
And drenched with mystery.

Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns..."

it goes on, the stanzas get longer. never returns to couplets, though there's a tercet before the last stanza. what else are couplets? my stupid, buffy-obsessed brain wants me to talk about buffy the vampire slayer rather than couplets right now. maybe my brain will be content with listing. bufffy, spike, anya, xander....ha. maybe there's a vampire-lovers group in houston that tony and i could join. i haven't been obsessed with a tv show in a long time. i think this time in houston is my second adolescence.

before i finish devolving, i wanted to bite at the obvious provocation of prose poems moving in contempt of music or whatever. ha! i'm not going to argue against it now, but i will............

in conclusion, much love from me and tony.