Can you say something about your --
the relationship between the lyric and a sentence
because some lyric comes--
a lot of them actually rely on fragments and short lines.
That's true.
And it seems like the prose passages in Deepstep
are just as lyrical as the others.
And the others are like you're saying, often in sentence.
Right.
So I'd love to hear you talk about the relationship
between the lyric and sentence.
I don't know that I know.
I don't know that I have an articulate view of it
other than--
I thought my own sentences were very wooden
and that I wanted to see if I could make them more supple
and do more things.
And I knew that the sentence was capable of doing a lot more
things than I had done with it.
So I thought--
I don't know.
I know in the book Just Whistle I used
a lot of very medical language.
And somehow, to me, that seemed very lyric
just because it was such a weird specialized language.
So I just think that there's a lot more musicality in English
than we get out of it and that sonic relations --
there's just a lot more timbre in there
to play with than we think.
And I think the prose poem itself can lock up.
It can lose that.
But you can work it.
It didn't-- you don't have to siphon off all of the lyric
qualities in it just because you're working in the block
of print.
So if I don't--
it's an interesting question.
I don't really have an adequate answer.
When you were reading last night,
I could tell that the passage about the babies in the diapers
and the timothy was prose, but it
was one of the most lyrical passages
that you had hit so far partly because of the repetition.
Repetition, yeah.
But the cadence of that prose was absolutely beautifully
lyric.
And then to go back to the line calling after that was it
was that, the speaking of the two styles
there was especially rich out loud again.
Maybe part of it is a sense of phrasing, that phrasing is--
I mean, almost in this sense of a musical phrase.
If you think of that as your unit instead of the line,
then you can milk a little more that lyricism out of it.