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N O T R E P R O D U C T I O N Retrofuturism Nº10
“never”. Add “bafflement” and the poem will spell “neverending
bafflement”, a neat characterization of the subject,
the person with the secret life who is addressed. “nERVE”
is available, too, for whatever that’s worth. “VERVE”, too.
Thus does the disconcealment jiggle ordinary words beyond
their first meanings.
Although it is not emphatically metaphoric, “Your Secret
Life” has touches of the figurative. One is the way most
of the letters of “bafflement” shrink down to secret-size
and hide in the E, thus metaphoring a kind of subterranean
life. At the same time the word enacts a visual metaphor
for bafflement, its spelling causing that state, at least initially,
for most readers.
The second of the three samples of Sequencing I want to
discuss is called “Philosophy”. Its main form of
disconcealment is Crosswording, which consists of the sharing
of one or more letters between two or more words (or
phrases)—as, in fact, in the poem just examined. It allows
“Philosophy” to say, “ThOughTS in KnOTS”— which, presumably,
is what philosophy consists of.
The piece also makes use of the most common kind of
disconcealment, the Disruption. The Disruption is merely
the breaking up of a word or phrase in such a way as to
reveal inner words or partial words that increase its potential
for meaningfulness. The insertion of spaces into words
would be another way to describe this device. It occurs in
almost all of the poems in Sequencing, including “Your
Secret Life”. In “Philosophy” the Disruption produces such
extra meanings as the “ugh” that philosophical exertion in
part is, and “Thin” and “think’n”, which are minor but add
appropriate atmospheric effects to the poem. The arrangement
of letters is to a degree a visual onomatopœia for knots,
too—that is, it looks like what it denotes.
Perhaps my favorite of the poems in Ernst’s collection is
the one called “Proserpina”. This poem depends chiefly on
disconcealment by crosswording: the words “have” and
“come” are linked by a shared “E”; and an “I” crosswords
the result into “I come” and “I have”. Two Es lower on the
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