I want to be a verb, since for too long I have
been written a noun only, but no longer satisfied
with being the name, the namer, the named,
I want to name endlessly, be the verb’s verve
like Rita’s photographs, poetry pushes at edges
into spaces where language refuses clarity,
coherence, composition, even comprehensibility,
amidst literally infinite alliterative possibilities
like holograms, the part in the whole,
rhizome connections in the earth,
the sheer certitude of everything spilling
and spelling out in fractal inevitability
as poems refuse to be consumed, preclude
easy access, even a ready location for readers
who are invited to find, if they can, their positions
for responding in a tantalizing textualizing
as poems invite the words to flow around
the reader, even in and through the reader
who must surrender the desire to hold the text
in place, must carry the memory of mystery
and sift the fragments like hypertextual links
to somewhere untracked to other places,
like e. e. cummings, somewhere i have never
travelled, gladly beyond
A Tangle of Lines |
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About
the Author
Carl Leggo is a poet and professor
in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at
the University of British Columbia where he teaches courses
in English language arts education, writing, and narrative
research. His poetry and fiction and scholarly essays have
been published in many journals in North America and around
the world. He is the author of three collections of poems: Growing
Up Perpendicular on the Side of a Hill, View from My Mother’s House (Killick
Press, St. John’s), and Come-By-Chance (Breakwater Books, St. John’s),
as well as a book about reading and teaching poetry: Teaching to Wonder: Responding
to Poetry in the Secondary Classroom (Pacific Educational Press, Vancouver).
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