My Couplet, My Cupola

Now it's my turn to be chomping at the bit to join a conversation (O 'tis a planet replete with obligationz that keeps me from thee, Plaxterk Owel) because the couplet was both my beau and my bane for awhile there. In fact, I began to worry at one point that I was hopelessly mired in its track. The reasons for this were basically ones that have already been touched on in this discussion: the orderliness was welcome at a time when my poems seemed hopelessly haywire, because it made the haywireness seem like it might be intentional (and tensional) and I was thus off the hook, temporarily – I could sit back and let the poem chatter to itself like a set of wind-up teeth without any accompanying guilt; similarly, the regular injections of space really alleviated the claustrophobia plaguing my poems at the time. I almost think of those space breaks as breaths for the eyes. They remind both the author-docent and the reader-tourist that there is no need to hurry through this attraction, it'll be open for hours yet... So I suppose writing in couplets was a perfect way for me to self-medicate my own short attention span and tendency towards hastiness. Like: OK, Kramp, no logrolling down this here hill because it's got all this speed bumps and mule trenches to contend with – just walk like a regular person, breathe with your eyes, it'll be fine.

(I'm glad that Jared quoted from "Nosferatu," too, because that poem was written right at the tail end of my main couplet phase, right as I was beginning to seriously engage with, well, tercets (next on the food chain, I guess). If it were just a block of text I think it would be a little too intense, or a little too sweet. And Lauren, I don't know if you remember those two dream-poems I gave you right before you left – those were just a little later, a relapse into the easy comfort of the couplet.)

Beyond spacing and ordering, a couplet is quite alluring to me, aesthetically. I don't know what it is exactly. The excerpt from H.D. gets at it, I think. Something about the way that a couplet allows for both a sense of tidiness and also a pretty radical and repetitive vertical enjambment – it both frees me up to play and also encourages a burnishing of each individual couplet so that each becomes almost its own curio. I would hate to think of it this way all the time – poem as assemblage of bric-a-brac – and curio is certainly a shitty word. Maybe artifact is better, which I like because, to think about time periods as was suggested with the H.D. thing, poems do exist temporally even though they're slammed onto the page with a great simultaneity (by the writer, by the printing press, however you prefer to read that). They're not like music that can only exist temporally in an unspooling present. Rather, because they can be leapt around in and spliced by the reader’s mind, they're more like a music that, unless read aloud and therefore in sync with that present, exists almost historically or somehow relative to history – they share with history a temporal plasticity. It seems both briefly interesting and obnoxious to read poems as histories and stanzas as tidy or untidy epochs on a historical chain.

Anyway, I really like the Lawrence excerpt and how he maintains a certain plasticity of form. My tendencies have always been to lean on form a little too hard, both because of the way it shores up my ruins and also because of the ways it fucks me up and gets me away from my first impulse. I, personally, would gladly have continued with the couplets in the Lawrence poem so that a space break would set off a new couplet beginning "So morbid, as the Italians say." That I’m amused by this odd and momentarily dislocated statement probably just reflects my chintzier sensibility. In any case, I’ve often felt deep admiration for writers who entered into and then broke free of forms, who did whatever was necessary to fight their way out of rigidity. And if couplets can be one thing, for all their cuteness and their unitness and their ability to jackhammer the poem’s walls and their propensity to fuck up rhetoricians big time, they can be rigid. Like time/history, maybe -- and maybe my admiration for writers who insist on newer and more plastic forms comes from this: I recognize in myself too much tendency toward rigid regulation, too much allegiance to a calendar-way, too much acceptance of things-as-they-are-and-must-be, and thus I appreciate deviation from locked poetic form as being both wild and a little utopian and maybe even antihistorical. – So now I’m saying that poems are antihistories? I evidently don’t really know what I’m saying. Maybe that poetry and history are two strands in a larger, darker braid. Maybe shifting a poem’s form so that it avoids a visual tick-tock emphasizes its difference from history and measured past time and linearity and enables it to briefly exert greater power. Brother Poetry Left Hand wrestling the purely historical right. Greater braid-power from the frizzy strand.

I'm starting to feel stoned, so I'll cut this off, now that I'm nowhere and unclear whether I even said anything. I guess that’s the beauty of the esoteric.

And while I'm at it, I have this wonderful Golden Dawn to tell you about, Mr. Crowley...