Corman remix

Cid Corman's poem beginning "It isn't for want" haunts me. It's the urgent quality of Cid's voice, recorded there over the telephone. And the way he so pressingly emphasizes any word adjacent to the word "you," as in "Something to tell you" or "To detain you." The phrases of the poem go round in my mind. So much so that I decided to remix the poem, almost as a way of getting it out of my head. As if to Stein-ize it would relieve it of its longing to have us listen. The remix also has the virtue, I think, of instructing us in Corman's use of breath as a formal unit. Anyway, I'm certain this will sound annoying to some, but here you go.

love, Cid

From left to right: Cid Corman, Ed Baker, Ted Enslin, Chuck Sandy, at the Lorine Niedecker 100th, November 2003, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo by Ed Baker...well, taken with Ed's camera by John Martone. More photos here. And here are Cid's letters to Ed, the earliest dated 1972.

the late Cid

We've now released the 23rd episode of PoemTalk. This one is about a poem by Cid Corman. Click here for more, and for a link to the recording.

keep you from going

Defining key aspects of the modern--can't be done simply. But why not try? Here's one. The modern poem isn't about expression or expressiveness, something the poet has urgently wanted to say. It's primarily neither topical nor personal in the accepted 20th-century sense of the person who has things "inside" that must be said, written, conveyed. The poem isn't telling you you should or must know something. It doesn't cover or fill a gap, a need, a want. The poem is merely (oh that huge "merely" - but I don't mean it trivially) a means of keeping a reader from going from it, a detention, a planning to stay, and then--in it--is a remnant of the poet, all we know of him or her at that moment, then (now, the time of coming upon the words) and here (in the poem itself, making an inside that's nowhere else but where it is).

To the extent that the above definition is apt and useful, then the modern verse mode derives largely from Emily Dickinson, who in more than half her poems makes the point I've made above the matter of the poem.

And Cid Corman, not otherwise deemed Dickinsonian, is surely getting at this in this poem:

It isnt for want
of something to say--
something to tell you--

something you should know--
but to detain you--
keep you from going--

feeling myself here
as long as you are--
as long as you are.

And here is a recording of Cid Corman reading that poem (and another short one after it).