dium, 198–99. For a discussion of Cage’s use of constraints in Roaratorio, see my
“The Music of Verbal Space: John Cage’s ‘What You Say,’ ” in Sound States: Innovative
Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, with accompanying CD, ed., Adalaide Morris
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 129–48.
- The poems, in the order cited, may be found in The Norton Anthology of Mod-
ern and Contemporary Poetry, vol. 2, ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and
Robert O’Clair (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003): Yusef Komunyakaa, “My Father’s
Love Letters,” 863; James Fenton, “Dead Soldiers,” 901; Jorie Graham, “The Dream
of the Uni¤ed Field,” 927; Rita Dove, “Claudette Colvin Goes to Work,” 986; Thylias
Moss, “Interpretation of a Poem by Frost,” 1001; Cathy Song, “Sunworshippers,” 1022;
Henri Cole, “Folly,” 1038. In all fairness, the antholog y does contain a sampling of
“alternate” poetries—for example, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and
Michael Palmer—and there are of course poets like Paul Muldoon who use sound in
interesting ways. But the dominant mode is the one I describe here. - I discuss what I call “the linear fallacy” in an essay by that name for The Geor-
gia Review 35 (winter 1981): 855–69. - Language poetry and related experimental modes of the nineties differ from
this model in that syntax is often fractured, continuity fragmented, and puns mul-
tiple. But, interestingly, the aural dimension of poetry generally plays no greater part
here than in the more mainstream poems above. Here are two typical poems pub-
lished in Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Po-
etry, 1960–1990 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1994)—Ray Di Palma’s “The Wrong Side
of the Door”:
Supplementary to the account
Are a series of tangled memories
And observations at random
Written in a logbook bound in burlap. (661)And James Sherry’s “Pay Cash Only”:
She shakes feathers toward him
to ward off buttering his own
small bills, ¤lled with soldiers
of diverse excess, caught up
in an investment in lunch.
As they say, “Hog tied to penny rolls,
his car won’t go down the road straight.” (707)Again, however complex their irony and wordplay, the form of the poems is lineated
prose.
- See The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger
296 Notes to Pages 213–216