I know Alice Notley isn’t the only person to write about the relationship between “line” and “sentence,” but I have always appreciated the illustrations she uses in her essay, “American Poetic Music at the Present Moment.” (found in Coming After (University of Michigan Press, 2005)) For a long time, I don’t think I was a very good reader of, say, Eileen Myles’s poems, because I am so easily seduced by Notley’s involved lines amassing so much imaginative energy. I like getting lost in the poetic line. Or immersed. And I really like having Notley, a poet so interested in the longer line (at least in her books from the 1990s on), teach me how to read someone like Myles.
And even though Max Winter’s lines in “Down by the Sea” aren’t about the quick-change line break, or the chopped-up completed or incompleted sentence stretching over many lines, there is something notable about the rhythm occurring at each line break. Or would it be more appropriate to call it a tempo? I am just really taken by the poem’s investment in the poetic line as a unit (Winter even signals this by doing the conventional capitalization at the start of each line), and how subtly Winter shifts or morphs the task for that unit. Should the lines be read as a catalogue? So that “The teased knot in the vapor over the kettle” is equivalent to “Do you pray we ask when it is serious”? I think it’s a possible read for the poem.
Because the poem is highlighting how all “these things / Make a song a register too high to hear”. And it’s that overarching song the poem hears on behalf of its reader that adds this layer I’m proposing—a layer tha sits alongside the other layers, like “air inside this room [that] does not change.” Or a daily history towering over the poet and blessing the poet. And all of it in this steady and assured poetic voice.
Useful Links
- Down by the Sea, available online for your reading pleasure!
- Bennington Review 10, the issue where the poem appears.
- Solid Objects, the press where Winter is co-editor
Comments
One response to ““Down by the Sea,” by Max Winter”
Max Winter was writing page after page in an invented script a year or more before he learned to write. I know this because I am Max’s father.