On poetic form
At two o’clock on a hot day I was standing on Smith Street trying to decide what to have for lunch, or rather standing on the corner of Smith Street and Johnson Street, where the framing shop is, when I saw a poet I hadn’t seen in many years crossing the road towards me. The poet was wearing a suit and a red polo shirt, carrying a leather briefcase in one arm and a bundle of books in the other. I waved as the poet approached but he didn’t recognize me. I said his name and he looked up. “Oh Oscar, Oscar,” he said and reached out and rubbed my shoulder. “I thought you were in America.” I told him I was but now I’m back. “Oh good good good welcome back to the center of the world,” he said, gesturing at the intersection where a tram was passing by. He continued: “I’m working on something new. It’s brilliant, incredibly brilliant, amazing. It’s a new poetic form that works on language the way that the virus works on the body and society. It breaks it down and then builds it back up again. My partner and my sister think it’s rubbish and usually I’d believe them but I think this time they’re wrong. I think it’s brilliant. It’s like pandemic Oulipo. But not exactly because Oulipo is avant grade. I don’t like avant grade or anything that does obscurantism. I like my poetry to mean something. But as you know, we never know what’s going to mean something to someone.” The poet had recently received a letter from a woman who read a book of his, one of the more experimental ones, which consists of poems written not with words but with numbers. Rows and rows of numbers. “Her father was a drug addict,” the poet said. “He lived in St Kilda, and then he died and this woman went to live with her mother. After a while she got tired of living with the mother so she moved into a flat on her own in Richmond. She felt like she was going mad living alone and she was grieving. So she walked to the bookshop, the one on Swan Street, I don’t know if it’s still around, and she went straight to the poetry section. She wasn’t sure why. She hadn’t ever read a book of poetry but she thought it might help. She picked up my number poems. She went back to her flat and read them and she wrote to me to tell me that she found them so full of joy and life. She wrote to tell me that the number poems might have saved her life. And I read this letter and I was so moved. Incredible. I was almost crying.”
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Reading Recommendations
So It Is in Life, vignettes by Daniil Kharms.
A Rape in Cyberspace, an essay by Julian Dibbell.
Untranslatability, a short story by James Yeh.
What Was the Ted Talk, a cultural history of the Ted talk by me.