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Fragment, Juxtaposition, And Completeness: Some Notes
And Preferences
When Guilliame Apollinaire impulsively removed all the punctuation from
the prepublication galleys of his first book,
Alcools, in 1912, he
broke down the compartments of grammar in ways that would affect the
poetry of the century that followed. A few years later in
Calligrammes, when he
positioned poetic fragments in spatial patterns on the page, he proved
that white space and irregularity could be part of a poem's structural
composition. The poetics that grew from these technical innovations have
been variously described as modernist, as the "poetics of surprise," as
"open field" poetry, poetic montage, as "indeterminate," as
"reader-centered." The poetics of juxtaposition, fragment and collage
have been practiced throughout the twentieth century, sometimes
centrally, sometimes peripherally. Many would say collage is the central
artistic device of modernism, and its foremost contribution to
twentieth-century art. And in our own time, the mode�fragment and
collage�is experiencing a conspicuous renaissance.
"In the constant
conversation between unity and disunity, juxtaposition plays with
omission and collision."
In his important, informative, and very readable book on the origins of
modern abstract art,
The Banquet Years, the
critic Roger Shattuck tracks the genealogy of early modernism in France,
including the poetics of juxtaposition. Shattuck offers a rich
assortment of the rationales for juxtaposition:
- The Egyptians were the first men to dress stone so clean it
fitted together without crack or fault. The past hundred years have
attained a contrasting and less imposing goal�an art composed in the
rough, on the principle of interval and tension between parts.
- Around the turn of the century, the arts begin to resist the
convention of arranging their findings in established patterns of
consistency....
- Juxtaposition, with its surprises and intimacy of form, brings
the spectator closer than ever before to the abruptness of creative
process.
- The dominant trait of the prewar poems of Reverdy and Salmon and
Apollinaire has been described as "negligence." To finish in the
sense of removing all traces of sketch and struggle and uncertainty
became the surest way of destroying the authenticity of their work.
- Mosaic style, truncated syntax, cancellation of punctuation�all
of these devices increase the inclusiveness of his poetry by keeping
it open to all combinations and interpretations; the primary
quality...is ambiguity.
- The fragments of a poem are deliberately kept in random order to
be reassembled in a single instant of consciousness.
- Without causal progression, everything is middle.
- The juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements, the art of violent
dislocation, affects us slightly differently. We are thrown back
upon a desperate effort of assimilation.
Collage is really the practice of a theory of
knowledge. Antirational and semi-intentional, it takes disorder,
coincidence and chance materials as part of its method and inspiration.
By eliminating transition, it embraces ambiguity, improvisation, speed,
and multiplicity of meaning. It is expressive, but not primarily
self-expressive. It places priority neither on closure, nor on
conventional notions of completeness. In the constant conversation
between unity and disunity, juxtaposition plays with omission and
collision. It loves the energy of disruption and dislocation.
Apollinaire, his contemporaries, and their aesthetic heirs were more
interested in creating inventive disorientations than in delivering
packaged unities.
"The fractured poem
may be relatively linear and continuous, or it may be radically
disjunctive, but when transition is removed, relations become implicit,
not explicit. Content may be whole, or partial, or it might even be
subversively suppressed, left to be provided by the reader."
For the sake of fixing a usable terminology, one way to put it might be
this: fragment is the unit, juxtaposition is the method, collage is the
result. When you juxtapose two fragments next to each other, without
transition, you get collage. In fact, when you place any two dissimilar
units side by side�even complete sentences, even paragraphs�they acquire
the quality of fragment, because they are not completed by their
surroundings. The fractured poem may be relatively linear and
continuous, or it may be radically disjunctive, but when transition is
removed, relations become implicit, not explicit. Content may be whole,
or partial, or it might even be subversively suppressed, left to be
provided by the reader.
What we get, at one end of the spectrum, is something like "Festival,"
one of Apollinaire's strangely buoyant wartime poems. In "Festival," the
spectacle of flares above the WWI battlefield (where Apollinaire served
in the artillery) provokes an associative soliloquy from the speaker:
Fireworks in steel
How delightful is this lightning
An artificer's artifice
Mingling grace with valor
Two flares
Rose explosion
Like two breasts unbound
Raising their nipples insolently
HE KNEW HOW TO LOVE
what an epitaph
A poet in the forest
Gazes languidly
His revolver on its safety catch
At roses dying of hope...
By contemporary standards, the mild disjunctions of
the lyric "Festival" do not hold much difficulty for the reader. The
implied backstory is well within grasp. Nonetheless, the poem
illustrates the peculiar, energizing, jigsaw-puzzle quality that results
when transitions are removed and when grammar is broken. The verbless
second stanza, for example, leaves it to the reader to infer the
associative sequence of sensory perception, simile, and morbid-erotic
fantasy:
Two flares
Rose explosion
Like two breasts unbound
Raising their nipples insolently
HE KNEW HOW TO LOVE
what an epitaph
"Negligence" is the description Shattuck uses for the
style of Apollinaire and his friend Pierre Reverdy, implying a casual,
deliberately unbuttoned representation of mind-in-motion. But another,
distinct effect of this fractured, fragment style, of such
under-telling, is to create a faint aura of enigma. The memory of a
woman, the bomb's flare, the poet on the battlefield, the possibility of
death�these images and themes hover in loose relation to each other�but
how do they go together? The speaker's thoughts and feelings are
implicitly sketched, but loosely, elusively arranged. All poems contain
some interpretive openness, but here the absence of connectives leaves
much to the individual reader's intuition. Such is one primary effect of
collage and juxtaposition: less orchestration, more participation.
"...that to understand
a particular poem employing fracture, it is important to recognize the
underlying orientation. Very similar-looking poetic surfaces can be the
manifestations of very different underlying aesthetics."
"Festival" is a poem in the romantic tradition�a spontaneous-seeming
expression of the individual sensibility in a heightened state. Its
orientation is psychological. In Apollinaire's "Monday Christine Street"
(whose title serves as context), the fragments issue not from a single
speaker, but from multiple voices. This is what literary critics now
call "polyvocal" or "heteroglossaic." Here the intention of the collage
is not to record the associative process of an individual, but the
mosaic of a swirling social milieu. An excerpt:
Those pancakes were divine
the water's running
Dress black as her nails
It's absolutely impossible
Here sir
The malachite ring
The ground is covered with sawdust
Then it's true
The red headed waitress eloped with a book seller.
A journalist whom I really hardly know
Look Jacques it's extremely important what I'm going to tell you
Shipping company combine
These two poems by the same writer, so distinct in
character, yet employing a common technique, make evident a principle
for reading: that to understand a particular poem employing fracture, it
is important to recognize the underlying orientation. Very
similar-looking poetic surfaces can be the manifestations of very
different underlying aesthetics. In the case of the two Apollinaire
poems, "Festival" uses fragment to mime an intensely subjective psychic
process; in "Monday Christine Street," fragment is used to simulate the
vivacious, concurrent disorderliness of social realities.
The possible deployments and effects of poetic fracture and
juxtaposition are too manifold to identify, or catalogue. Yet even so,
some familiar employments of poetic fracture can be identified, each
with an underlying premise and an intended effect. These are:
1) to imply psyche in extremity (psychological expressionism)
2) to render actual perceptual process (impressionism)
3) to simulate the fracture and disorder of modern experience
4) to emphasize the inadequacy of language
5) to pose the poem on the page as an improvisatory "open" verbal
field of
possible combinations
I. Fragment Used as Psychological Expressionism
It makes sense to begin with (or to continue, from "Festival") the
familiar category of #1, the psychological, where so much American
poetry has staked its claim for the last one hundred years. One common
employment of fracture is to evoke a speaker's heightened psychological
state�distress, or, in some cases, rapture. In this category, the
prosody of fragment imitates the accelerated or disrupted stream of
consciousness of fear, excitement or illumination, a state of mind
which�as the form implies�makes grammatical convention impossible.
"By violating the
conventions of syntax and narrative, the style requires that the reader
participate imaginatively in the narrative context of the poem, the
reconstruction of both story and the speaker's state of mind."
Catie Ford's use of a fractured style in the poem, "Last Breath in
Snowfall," skillfully creates the effect of a speaker in a heightened
state�we are left to deduce whether the state is anxiety, hysteria or
transport:
I loved one person do you see the evergreen there in fog one by one
I was taught to withdraw first from him do you want to know how
the mind works under extreme cold ice forming on the eyelid or
wind thrown
at me I felt every needle felt every breath I've seen a vision of you
I was told and
in it disobedience in it nakedness you have not surrendered
have not torn his letters
liken yourself therefore to the messenger who broke the tablets....
Here the effect of collage is to render an emotive
voice caught in the scrambled tumult of interior experience; Ford's use
of run on and enjambment amplifies the fractured effect�a mind in
stress, or, as the poem glosses itself, "how the mind works under
extreme cold." That voice impressionistically represents the fluttering
zigzag path of mental process. Ford's poem embodies Shattuck's aesthetic
claim for the mimetic "authenticity" of fracture: its irregularities
register the uncertainty and struggle of speaking. By violating the
conventions of syntax and narrative, the style requires that the reader
participate imaginatively in the narrative context of the poem, the
reconstruction of both story and the speaker's state of mind.
Of course this technique is not exclusively modern. The Roman literary
critic Longinus, in his essay "On the Sublime," endorses the use of
fragment by poets to simulate the disordered consciousness of great
excitement: "The words issue forth without connecting links and are
poured out as it were, almost outstripping the speaker himself," he
says. "[T]he lines, detached from one another, but nonetheless hurried
along, produce the impression of an agitation...a result Homer has
accomplished by the removal of conjunctions." Longinus might well be
describing Catie Ford's contemporary poem: the passionate agitation of a
single speaker expressed through the tumbled-together pieces of a
narrative.
"As in the Asian
tradition, spareness of detail and form suggests an underlying vision of
the natural world in which human presence is not central, and in which
the physical, not the intellectual, has primacy."
II. Fragment Used as Perceptual Impressionism
Another familiar poetic style employing fragment is the mode of terse,
compressed description-narration, a kind of shorthand of seeing. In the
following passage by Gary Snyder, the omission of transition and
explication creates an impression of lucid unfiltered perception, of
consciousness as camera. Here, the use of fragment acts to suppress the
presence of a narrator. In this Luddite linguistic style, verbs are
scarce; even most adjectives seem excessive: This section is from
Synder's collection,
The Back Country:
Trail Crew Camp at Bear Valley 9000 Feet
Cut branches back for a day�
trail a thin line through willow
up buckbrush meadows
creekbed for twenty yards
winding in boulders
zigzags up hill
into timber, white pine.
gooseberry bush on the turns
hooves clang on the riprap
dust brush, branches.
a stone
cairn at the pass�
stript mountains hundreds of miles
.
sundown went back
the clean switchbacks to camp.
bell on the gelding.
stew in the cook tent,
black coffee in a big tin can.
Scoff cautiously at this kind of essentialism.
Snyder's writing may seem austerely non-directive, even primitive in its
technique, but is far from casual. "Trail Crew Camp" employs its
sketchbook minimalist technique with an intent of objectivity. As in the
Asian tradition, spareness of detail and form suggests an underlying
vision of the natural world in which human presence is not central, and
in which the physical, not the intellectual, has primacy. Here the use
of fragment effectively occludes the personality and commentary of the
speaker.
Allen Ginsberg, in Section II of his poem "Iron Horse," employs a more
stroboscopic Impressionism than Snyder, but one likewise dedicated to
perceptual veracity, and equally content with leaving out transition. In
Ginsberg's cinematic, "word-movie" method, allegedly adapted from Jack
Kerouac's
On the Road mode, we
feel the rush to get-it-all-in, relevant to his urban subject matter.
Though we may feel the excited consciousness of the speaker, the
intention here is primarily mimetic, the registration of outward, not
inward, perception.
Bus outbound from Chicago Greyhound basement
green neon beneath streets Route 94
Giant fire's orange tongues & black smoke
pouring out that roof
little gay pie truck passing the wall�
Brick & trees, E. London, antique attics
mixed with smokestacks
Apartments apartments square windows set like Moscow
Apartments red brick for multimillion population
out where industries raise craned necks
Gas station lights, old old old old traveler....
Perhaps the speed of Ginsberg's eye and mind is a
kind of emulation of urban velocity�he is riding a Greyhound bus, after
all. It makes a certain sense that Ginsberg sometimes cited as a model
the rough brushwork of Cezanne, whose painterly intention was a less
mediated, more "raw" perceptual flow.
III. Fragment Used To Imply the Fracture and Disorder of Modern
Experience
Although Ginsberg's joyful "Iron Horse" descriptions suggest some of the
dishevelment and disorders of the modern world ("antique attics mixed
with smokestacks"), that disorder is not its primary focus. Even so, the
disordering welter of modern reality is the most commonly cited
rationale for fragmentation of poetic styles. In fact, it is the most
frequently offered explanation of "postmodern" art in general, and
Eliot's "The Wasteland" is probably the most frequently cited example,
as in this polyglot, collaged passage from the poem's very end:
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon�O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
In Eliot's rendition of modern Babel, it is unclear
whether the linguistic fragmentation represents that of the speaker's
mind or of an entire civilization. The poem has been read both ways,
many times, of course, a fact which emphasizes the inseparability of the
psychological from the environmental.
Eighty years later, in the beginning of Carolyn Forch�'s poem "On
Earth," we find a contemporary cousin to "The Wasteland," a
similarly-splintered composition of modern derangement, a collage of
transitionless speeches, whose implication, more deliberately even than
in Eliot, is the wreckage of the modern world:
On Earth
"now appears to us in a mysterious light"
"did this happen? could it have happened?"
"everything clear ahead of her for the rest of her life"
"La terre nous amait un peu je me souviens"
"I try to keep from wanting the morphine. I pray with both hands"
"Lima, Alpha, Uniform, November, Charlie, Hotel, Echo, November,
Alpha, Bravo, Lima, Echo. Pap. Lima, Charlie, Alpha, Zero, One.
Acknowledge. Out."
"man and cart disappeared in the blast, but their shadows remained on
the bridge"
"these diaries a form of weather"
(a future hinting at itself)
(all of this must remain)
(an illness, after radiation, a mysterious illness)
(something) whispering
(the sadness when a hand�
�with the resistance of a corpse to the hands of the living�
"open the book of what happened"
"Open the book of what happened," Forch�'s speaker
says; and "these diaries a form of weather," the implication being that
only in a decentered kind of gathering, with the non-hierarchical
randomness of diaries or weather, can the sprawling disaster of modern
history be adequately suggested. Because the subject is too large for
any one speaker, fragments are used to imply the speech of many persons.
Here again, we note the occlusion of a narrative presence. Conventional
presentation, the form suggests, would imply comprehension of the
incomprehensible, and closure of what cannot be enclosed. Whispered
hints and vocal intimacies are here, but they are unattached to any
particularized authorial presence. The irregular punctuation further
implies disorder. For Forch�, the style of fragment, ironically, offers
both more intimacy and a more inclusive grasp than discursively handled
facts.
IV. Fragment Used To Imply The Inadequacy Of Language
To read "On Earth" is like spinning the dial of a shortwave radio: the
poet's method is to glean from the welter of voices and data. Yet in the
Forch� poem, even if modern history has unraveled our capacity to
objectively know it, there is still a faith in the naming power of
language, in the fundamental pact between word and thing. That faith is
not a presumption for the next category of fragment-slingers. In one
quadrant of contemporary poetry, stutter, incompletion and fragment are
techniques frequently used to expose the inadequacies of language
itself.
In some of Jorie Graham's work, for example, it is the inadequacy of
language to name, the instability of language, the disconnect between
sign and signified which takes the foreground. That
shortcoming�represented by fragmented text�becomes the central subject
matter of poetry:
Explain door ajar.
Explain hopeth all.
Explain surface future subject-of.
Piece.
Be swift.
(Let's wade again)
(Off stage: Pointing-at.)
(Offstage: stones placing themselves on eyes)
Here: tangle and seaweed
current diagram how deep? I have
forgotten....
(from "For
One Must Want/To Shut the Other's Gaze")
This Beckett-like excerpt comes from Graham's
collection
Swarm, poems in which
a metaphysical distress is emblematized by a speaker at the end of
speech.
Explain hopeth all.
Explain surface future subject-of.
Such broken speech implies a kind of semiotic shell
shock, like a one-armed person poking the end of a thread at the eye of
a needle that isn't there. If mad Ophelia had been a
linguistic-philosopher, she might have sung like this. The tone is one
of tragic frustration.
"In one quadrant of
contemporary poetry, stutter, incompletion and fragment are techniques
frequently used to expose the inadequacies of language itself."
These poetics near the end of speech have evolved their own vocabulary
of technique; not just the stutter and the singular words floating on
the page, but specialized punctuation, too: the blank ____; the empty
parentheses ( ). Such subversive punctuation has its own implications.
The blank, for instance, implies that the uttered is surrounded by the
unsaid, or the unsayable. More generally, the implication might be that
punctuation, which oversees connection-making like a traffic cop, is
corrupt and dysfunctional. Whatever the intention, such irregular
signage is another kind of fragmentation, with a host of implicit
insinuations.
Much contemporary poetry includes some acknowledgment of the
limited capacity of words to stand for things. Inchoateness, like that
of "For One Must What," is an extremist mode of acknowledging such
limitations. The enigmatic title of Michael Palmer's poem, "or anything
resembling it," similarly seems to claim the shortcomings of language as
its central topic. As in the passage by Graham, the speaker here seems
marooned, or exiled, in an inadequate symbolic universe, that of a
language which does not exactly reach any shore. The poem begins:
The hills like burnt pages
Where does this door lead
Like burnt pages
Then we fall into something like the sea
A mirrored door
And the hills covered with burnt pages
With words burned into the pages
The trees like musical instruments attempt to read
Here between idea and object
Otherwise a clear even completely clear winter day....
Despite the intrinsic intellectuality of writing
about representation, Palmer fashions his broken speech into a kind of
existentialist lyricism. And here, again, fragments serve the poetic
intention well: the short, abrupt units of speech emphasize that meaning
is a brief, effortful, and somewhat stunted achievement.
In these two examples we can also discern that, even in such a
minimalist, discontinuous style, different poetic speakers are
nevertheless perceptibly distinct in tone. Graham's skittish and
agitated style emphasizes the psychic plight of the individual speaker.
Palmer's blunter and more composed speaker seems to speak of a
collective human condition.
V. Fragment Used To Pose the Poem on the Page as an "Open"
Verbal Field Of Possible Combinations
Perhaps these categories make it possible to identify
some of the common underlying premises of fragment-using styles. To
recognize a poet's emotional or intellectual intention is to possess a
context which enables us as readers to better respond. But there are a
thousand degrees and styles of poetic disjunction. Despite the
usefulness of categories, in the blurry, hybridities of aesthetic
practice, many contemporary poems fall outside any designated bin. In
their multiple shifting dimensions, such poems often slide or jumpcut
between different textures and agendas. Our ideas about what a fractured
poem is "doing" at a given moment may inevitably be, to use Marjorie
Perloff's famous term, "indeterminate."
This inconclusiveness of affect and content is precisely the desired
effect of some poetry employing collage. Such poems would constitute our
fifth, rather catch-all, hybrid category: poems which aren't
specifically psychological or descriptive; not exclusively about
modernity or the failure of language, but which are mainly compositions
about the play of suggestiveness, without intending resolution. Such
poetry celebrates the recombinant "openness" of its possible readings.
We might call such poetry "experimental," though this label is of
limited help. The old term "open poetry" might be more appropriate.
Listen to the gusto of Jerome Rothenberg in his 1977 manifesto-essay,
"New Models, New Visions," praising the poetry of "open forms."
The action hereafter is "between" and "among," the forms hybrid and
vigorous and pushing always towards an actual and new completeness.
Here is the surfacing...of "fruitful chaos"...It is...the consequence
in art-and-life of the freeing up of the "dialectical imagination."
And here is the more contemporary, but equally upbeat
poet-critic Charles Bernstein, pitching the same product in more
latter-day jargon:
The moment not subsumed into a schematic structure,...but at every
juncture creating (synthesizing) the structure. Structure that can't
be separated from decisions made within it, constantly poking through
the expected parameters. Textures, vocabularies, discourses,
constructivist modes of radically different character are not
integrated...(but) constantly criss-crossing, interacting and creating
new gels....
A representative sample of this orientation of "open"
collage-poetics can be found in the opening of "Tincture of Pine," by
the poet Gillian Connoley. Connoley relishes wide gaps of association
and uses the "field" of the page, a la Apollinaire, to hang fragments in
the white space, "open" to the reader's interpretative industry:
I am Citizen of the wind, I am bird-infested
data and regret, the clouds purl two
unhitch
[why only one
head, why only
two faces]
one for noontide one for old horse in the mire
Furious are giants arguing over maps
History lays a violence under the peacefulness
someone goes
driving the car....
Connoley's style here reminds us of some of the
elemental premises and properties of most fragment and collage�its
improvisatory freedom, its rough physicality on the page. These are
properties which attracted the pioneers of modern poetry, Williams,
Eliot and Pound. Here words are handled partly as manipulable physical
materials; this aesthetic is sometimes known by the terms
"constructivist" or "objectivist." The poem can be seen as a sort of
mobile sculpture, one which may contain theme or narrative, but which
also aspires to be an interesting object in its own right.
"If poetry is an art of
concentration, can
it actually survive such dispersedness of content and form? If
it is an art of suggestiveness, is this
suggestive enough to reward our effort?"
Yet Connoley's poem also reminds us of the dissatisfaction we can feel
when meeting art of such jazzy freedom, poetry "without commitment to
explicit syntactical relations between elements," as David Antin says.
If a certain amount of inexplicitness is energizing, as we have seen,
how "inexplicit" can a poem be and still give reader-gratification? How
strong is our internal demand, as readers, for recognition of the form
of what we are looking at? If we interrogate the poem using that
criteria of recognition, we might ask, into which of our categories does
"Tincture of Pine" fall? One argument could be made for category #1, the
psychologically-fractured. Likewise, there is evidence for category #4,
the modernity-dissociated. The truth is probably some of each.
Yet even if we can contextualize "Tincture of Pine," by ascribing to it
a predominant intention, does it give us enough distinct pleasure or
entertainment, beauty or truth? Is Connoley's poem richly loose, like
the "uncut," director's-version of the mind, or is it formless, like an
unassembled puzzle? If poetry is an art of concentration, can
it actually survive such dispersedness of content and form? If
it is an art of suggestiveness, is this suggestive enough to
reward our effort? These are some of the traditional controversies
elicited by the collage-poem. To engage in its practice is necessarily
to encounter the politics of completeness and partiality, mimesis,
psychology, modernity, and deconstructive theory.
The poetry of fragment celebrates the connective resourcefulness of the
human mind, and the myriad simultaneous complexity of experience. It
walks the balance beam between orientation and disorientation, between
suggestiveness and mystification. Contemporarily, in some poetic
circles, fracture and breakage have become the techniques by which
authenticity and energy is certified�perhaps not much differently from
the way in which explicit confession was used in the past to certify
poetic authenticity.
Yet if we can admire the variety of functions made possible by fragment
and collage, we might also remember the considerable traditional powers
which are foregone when a writer gives up the grammatical sentence: the
complex powers of hierarchy and coordination, of flow, momentum,
relativity, and precision.
As an example, we might look at the beginning of Allen Grossman's wild
and weird narrative-meditative poem, "The Piano Player Explains
Himself."
When the corpse revived at the funeral,
the outraged mourners killed it; and the soul
of the revenant passed into the body
of the poet because it had more to say.
He sat down at the piano no one could play
Called Messiah, or Regulator of the World
Which had stood, to my knowledge
Beneath a painting of a red-haired woman
In a loose gown with one bared breast, and played
A posthumous work of the composer S�
About the impotence of God (I believe)
Who has no power not to create everything.
It was the Autumn of the year and wet
When the music started. The musician was
Skilled, but the Messiah was out of tune
And bent the time and the tone. For a long hour
The poet played the Regulator of the world
As the spirit prompted, and entered upon
The pathways of His power�while the mourners
Stood with slow blood upon their hands,
Astonished by the weird processional
And the undertaker figured his bill....
Grossman's fabular poem operates within the laws of
story-telling, description, and grammar. Yet it gathers up vivid
handfuls of the world into its ample subordinate clauses, while plunging
forward in its discursive story, rhythmically and syntactically gaining
momentum and grandeur, while implementing a provocative medley of tones
and themes. Here, transition and the inherited conventions of complex
grammar seem to permit wildness, not to curtail it. The narrative offers
plentiful opportunities for the reader's mind to go sideways, to
speculate, to "fill in," and yet the coherence of this created world
gives it depth and invites the reader to invest imagination and emotion.
We could call this is a landscape which is inflated, not collapsed;
three-dimensional, not two; explicit, not implied. It does not expose
the structures of meaning, but uses them to increase the store of
available reality. The powers of complex coherence, visible in
Grossman's poem and available to all of us, shouldn't be lightly
abandoned, or shunned.
"...if we can admire
the variety of functions made possible by fragment and collage, we might
also remember the considerable traditional powers which are foregone
when a writer gives up the grammatical sentence: the complex powers of
hierarchy and coordination, of flow, momentum, relativity, and
precision."
In an essay called "On Fragment," Frank Kermode offers us some words
that might lend us a place to close in a suggestive, rather than a
definitive, way: "we can reasonably say that over the philosophy of the
fragment there broods inescapably the shadow of totality." Kermode also
quotes the German philospher Schlegel:
To have a system, that is what is fatal for the mind;
not to have one, this too is fatal.
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