A few posts back I reviewed the latest, lovely publication by Ce Rosenow, proprietress of Mountains and Rivers Press. One of her press’s publications, Thomas Rain Crowe’s The Blue Rose of Venice, is reviewed today by Ron Silliman on his blog. Here’s hoping the exposure brings many more readers to her site!
I’ll let Silliman’s review speak for itself, but do want to point out one element he missed in the poem he quotes by Crowe. The poem, ““The Song of the Gondolier,” goes like this:
Short bridges.
Narrow canals.
A single wooden paddle
from a black boat on dark water
the only sound
as
the gondolier begins to sing
eeoo, eeoo
into the evening
and the mouth of
a cellular phone.
Silliman remarks on the placement of “as” on a single line, but oddly enough (for a man who has noted his penchant for counting things) Silliman misses the fact that “as” is the exact middle of the poem: there are 5 lines above and 5 lines below. One might be forgiven for seeing this as more than a device for framing the gondolier; it also seems to emphasize the contrast between the iconic, traditional image of Venice and the “absolutely modern” gondolier with his cell phone. Being startled by the irruption of the modern is a common experience for travelers in any ancient place, I think, and Crowe’s “as” serves to heighten the surprise.
South of Venice, surely, 's all I meant. Strange, though—geography. Do Floridians think of themselves as Southerners? Hmm.
Yo Joe,<br /><br />How dare you characterize Rome as "the South"! My landlord would have a heart attack. Signore Pasquale Nestico is from Calabria and doesn't even think of Naples as the South. Similarly, people in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam think of that as the real South, not bullshit Saigon!
Linh, I puzzled over "eeoo" because of the double "o", which I took to mean an "ooh" sound—and I always thought "io" was pronounced "ee<i>oh</i>". So I didn't think it could mean "I". Thanks to you and the devilish miracle of Google, though, which led me to <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=AEEhaJR6R3EC&pg=PA214&lpg=
Yo Joe,<br /><br />"eeoo" is probably "io" or "I," so the guy was just saying I this, I that into his cellphone.
Jilly, that's why I'm not a visual artist. Too literal!
Just talking about the visual form/shape.<br />-Jilly
Ron! You just had to get me thinking about <i>that</i> didn't you…<br /><br />And BadGlue, I thought of that too … but that puts the gondolier under water, doesn't it? Unless the speaker is a yogi doing headstand…?<br /><br />Great fun in any case….
Or the contrast could be what's above the water & what is reflected. 🙂
I was too busy trying to figure out the acrostic at the left margin 😉