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A Poem Is Disruption: Reading It Brings A Measure of Order

05.13.2013 by Ed Carson //

When a poem is written and then read, it moves both away from and toward the reader, and the mind follows, converting the free flow of reading to the linguistic equivalent of Cubism; its sounds and shapes rearrange and reintegrate themselves until the poem is continuously on the move.

The American poet Kenneth Rexroth describes Cubism in poetry as “the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture.” The key in this is in a poem’s structural arrangement and scheduling, the design and planning that emerges from both a free flow of emergent content and the composition of its form.

The poem remains within a kind of continuous loop, disturbing and disrupting in its content, forever pushing against the praxis of its form and structure.

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