Volume 23, Number 2-3, Summer-Fall 2006

"Naming the Poet" and "A Tangle of Lines"

Carl Leggo

University of British Columbia

carl.leggo@ubc.ca

Naming the Poet

as a poet I seek to be
an anarchic author
babbling barbaric
cacophonous chorus
divine daemonic
ebullient eccentric
fragrant fiction
galvanic glossarist
heretic hermeneut
illegible iconoclast
jovial juggler
keening kazoo
ludic lunatic
mad mystic
narcissistic narrator
ontological obscurant
playful pedagogue
querulous questioner
rhetorical rudiment
splitting subject
textual tease
ubiquitous utterance
versatile verbalist
whining warbler
xenogenetic xylographer
yapping yodeller
zealous zany

A Tangle of Lines

we need a poetic line, not a prosaic line,
a line that plays with possibilities of space,
draws attention to itself, contravenes convention,
will not parade from left to right margins,
back and forth, as if there is nowhere else
to explore, knows instead lived experience
knows little of linearity since the only linearity
we know is the linearity of the sentence which
waddles across the page like lines of penguins,
sentenced by the sentence to the lie of linearity,
chimeric sense of order, born of rhetoric, and so
instead the artist weaves her way in tangled lines,
knows wholeness in holes and gaps, in fragments
that refract light with fractal abandon, and savours
the possibilities of prepositions and conjunctions