image; Bill R Brown
There’s an interesting moment in a Virginia Woolf essay on Chaucer where she chops up his descriptions of a few different female characters and reconstitutes them into a kind of spammy Chaucerian everywoman, thereby proving either a) that all of Chaucer’s female characters are ‘of a type’, or b) that context is everything, and it’s very easy to misrepresent people when you are quoting less than a full sentence and expecting it to be redolent of an entire character—especially when we get to know most characters as part of a process of narrative. Well it’s a dirty trick, but here I go:
A Short and Meditative Lyric from the Future
So what I’ve done here is combine lists from a few poems from the last few decade or so into a hyperbolic vision of a poetry from the future, made entirely from lists of nice words. The first two are from Mina Gorji (‘Forbidden Fruit’ and ‘Empire of the Dandelion’, in New Poetries V: An Anthology, 2011), the third is from Pippa Little (Overwintering, 2012) and the fourth from Alice Oswald’s ‘Field’ (Woods etc., 2005). This is an evil and rude thing to do to the poetry of others, and I know it, but the question I wanted to ask here really concerned the different things that can happen when a poem concludes with a list, catalogue, register, index.
A Slightly Rude Series of Observations on
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