Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

For many years I wanted a child

though I knew it would only illuminate life

for a time, like a star on a tree; I believed

that happiness would at last assert itself,

like a bird in a dirty cage, calling me,

ambassador of ®esh, out of the rough

locked ward of sex.

Seven poems, all of them by distinguished prize-winning poets: in order
of their appearance, Yusef Komunyakaa, James Fenton, Jorie Graham, Rita
Dove, Thylias Moss, Cathy Song, and Henri Cole.^9 Yet, different as these po-
ets are from one another with respect to gender, ethnicity, and thematic con-
cerns, all of them observe what is currently a poetic formula: their “free
verse” is really—and perhaps intentionally—no more than lineated prose.^10
Here are my transpositions of the seven extracts above:

On Fridays he’d open a can of Jax af ter coming home from the mill,

& ask me to write a letter to my mother who sent postcards of desert

®owers taller than men. He would beg, promising to never beat her

again.

When his Excellency Prince Norodom Chantaraingsey invited me

to lunch on the battle¤eld, I was glad of my white suit for the ¤rst

time that day. They lived well, the mad Norodoms, they had style. The

brandy and the soda arrived in crates.

On my way to bringing you the leotard you forgot to include in your

overnight bag, the snow started coming down harder. I watched each

gathering of leafy ®akes melt round my footfall.

Menial twilight sweeps the storefronts along Lexington as the shad-

ows arrive to take their places among the scourge of the earth.

A young black girl stopped by the woods, so young she knew only

one man: Jim Crow[,] but she wasn’t allowed to call him Mister. The

woods were his and she respected his boundaries even in the absence

of fence.

“Look how they love themselves,” my mother would lecture as we

drove through the ironwoods, the park on one side, the beach on the

Procedural Poetics of Bök and Bergvall 213