--and tone, here's some of my premises outlined down here.
Tone constructs angles and distances, inside a poem.
Declares and insinuates attachments and detachments.
It is most visible in angularities,
in the constant multilevel dialectic going on
between material ingredients, champagne and tampons,
adjective and noun, lovable bastard,
between what is being said and how
it is being said [? see Paley ?] between odd and signifying
grammatical anatomies.
A host of erratic errata.
The problem with many poems is the total conversation
is not sufficiently complex or expressive
of the simultaneity of what we know.
And there's some more about tonal [INAUDIBLE].
Now I want to plunge on.
I want to look at least two of the poems.
Of course, I misspent my time a little bit here
but we're still going to have some time for some Q and A.
And I want to go to a poem on the page after that,
called "Hospital" by a poet named Jason Shinder.
So the point I want to make is if you go back
to the Matthea Harvey and the Mark Halliday poem,
you can see that these--
I think it is very important in the distance of this poem is,
I'm not going to be fooled.
I'm not going to be sucked into the representational,
you know, myth, into the paradigm,
into the hegemony of narrative.
I'm not going to be suckered by the convention.
I'm not going to participate in these conventions of narrative
that are done a thousand times before.
I'm not going to be fooled.
But the desire not to be fooled is only half of poetry.
There's another half.
That's the detachment half.
The attachment half is the other half.
And when you look at that little passage by Paley
you can see that she is in the situation.
She actually ends up sleeping with the guy, OK.
That's the willingness to be part of the problem, you know.
As opposed to just stepping away from the problem entirely.
So, here's a poem by Jason Shinder
that I think is quite amazing for its tonal complexity.
"Hospital."
"While the machine is sucking the black suds from
my mother's"-- the moment is a son is sitting by his hospital
bed with his mother-- "while the machine is sucking the black
suds from my mother's blood and then sending it back down,
stinking clean, into the pistol to kneel down into her chest.
I climb out of my shoes and slip a cotton swab
of water between her teeth.
Her dentures sliding off the back porch of her mouth.
Nobody knows.
Nobody can ever know how she has to pee wrapped in a diaper
but can't.
The yellow eggs she ate one hour ago already the shit
in her bowels.
And lonely.
Head hanging from the balcony of her body, lonely.
Darkest passage from the hairless vagina, lonely.
But brave, but lonely.
Because I did not stay all night.
Because I won't.
Because I'm going to pull out her bone that hurts the most
and break the back of every word I ever said to her.
The world is evil, mother.
And so-- and I am too."