Whenever I let one poem take up a whole page--or, rather, when I really let white space take up the whole page, I think something like: "This is lame. And precious. And I know that 'precious' has very gendered connotations." And then I change it back so that the page has text all over it. I don't want there to be very many rests in my work. I don't want to encourage my readers to rest in my poems. I want them to be, at best, carried away, overwhelmed, energized, breathless. Turned on.
3 comments:
Here-Here! I agree that too much white-space can be a bad thing: I'm totally not opposed to unconventional spacing, but mostly find that 20 words per page is just not enough; this is an issue I have with some of Barbara Guests work. Zukofsky has a like 6 or so word poem in the C Bernstein edited Library of America LZ, but the page is pocket-book sized, so the spareness, to my mind, is less irritating...tree-pulp is just too precious; minimalism which uses maximal resource freaks me out some.
Adam Strauss
just because they're using fewer words doesn't mean they're using more paper. and hey, they're using less ink.
So long as we're only talking one poem--true; but the minute we're talkin' two or more, less likely, as the two 20 word poems, sans spacing, would fit on one page.
Adam S
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