We’re an assemblyline culture. Slide the issue onto George’s desk, let him give it a glancing blow (does he ever read closely?), listen to him scratch out his approval on the dotted line. Hustle document out of oval office: The issue slides away out of sight, out of mind. (Does he ever re-think? Do Americans?)
That’s the culture my students grow up into. Read a book, close the cover, rarely consider it again, rarely connect it with another book, another event (intertextuality in the Bush B & W era? Are you kidding me?). That’s the culture I hope they can wrestle themselves free of or they will never be as free as B & W politicians tell them they are.
Most of us poet bloggers must be aliens. We must have snuck in over the border when we weren’t looking (we must have been reading as we skimmed under the barbwire). How the hell can we read as we read? How the hell can we slide a book off the shelf, thumb the well-thumbed pages, hum again in pleasure at a familiar passage? How can we survive the assembly line racing toward erasure?
Dan Davidson’s weather (SCORE, 1992), slipped off the shelf tonight. Damn but that man could write, phrases resonating, backward, forward, sideways, up-down, inside-out, any way but machine-like straight:
I have been bribed to be brought up holding to the world(knowledge of sources)
(some focus then ) presents a disguise
(and is the most valuable scrap)
when I think a fricative hush
a writing groans, strains in name
(it’s last on the list)
and
whose drawing commentsimagining in upon (facilitates) (process of)
after movement (prefiguring desire) at every
picture (prescription) (inclusion)
What the hell have you slipped off the shelf recently?
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