12/06/2005
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Recently read and enjoyed immensely Stacy Szymaszek's hyper glossia -- even though one major reason I liked it is because she is not trying to please everyone at once. Belladona's 80th phamplet is a poem of 8 pages, 7 of which look visually similar, though with slightly varying forms that suggest temporary outposts for the "glossia" to fill. The main body of the poem is strewn with what one line calls "plosive cluster[s]." My attention was drawn to a cluster of vivid images with two men who might actually be the same. The first sounds more heroic, "built like a man of wealth," and he has somewhat mythologized body. The second man appears in a kind of tryst underneath a sycamore tree where "he uses / his hands / to please her." The scene starts in the third person but then tranforms into the first person, kind of like the switch that happens when realizing that a dream is really about yourself. (Btw, I get the feeling that sycamores are dream trees, though maybe I am projecting too much of myself onto the poems.) The 8th page stands by itself. It has three columns with permutations of the letters in SEA CUTE. There are several ordinary words, like ACES, EAST, SAUCE, CUT, ATE, and CAUSE. These words are combined with the remaining letters of each permutation. The only whole word is EUSTACE, and I probably don't need to point out the phonetic spelling of Stacy's name, perhaps even with a "you" in front of it. I am a total sucker for anyone who uses personal information in indirect ways. I have a million examples. Just last week I bought a gallon of orange juice mainly because it expires on my birthday.

*I looked up EUSTACE and found it relates to a linguistics insitute at a university in Edinburough. I'm not sure what this means, or if it is relevant, but several places in the poem deal with the nature of speech.

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