Nr. 2 (19) anul VI / aprilie-iunie 2008 - ROMDIDAC

ock poetry in the formal and topic-related respects I have discussed up to
this point.
And indeed, Corso’s poems in the famous Donald Allen’s The New
American Poetry 1945-1960 prove to be a stunning illustration of the criteria
we have already tried to circumscribe above. Popular culture is present with
detective story and comics related vocabulary and images, with its typical
penchant for trite symbols and personifications – “Kindness,” as a character,
for instance (Allen 205) – as well as its preference for gaudy and sometimes
vulgar exoticism, interspersed here with the typical Beat spiritual and neurotic
twitches:
I have worn the splendid gowns of Sudan,
carried the magnificent halivas of Boudodin Bros.,
kissed the singing Fatimas of the pimp of Aden,
wrote glorious psalms in Hakhaliba’s café,
but I’ve never had the laughing sickness,
[…]
(Corso “Zizi’s Lament” selected in Allen 203)
As for the heterodox formalism we have advances above as a trait of rock
poetry – in the most comprehensive sense of the term – we can discover here
one of its both surprising and typical illustrations. In the fragment quoted above
we have an ‘almost perfect’ trochaic pentameter in the beginning, but then the
irregular trochees keep issuing while the measures are wildly inconsistent,
just as it fits the voice, the moods, the emphases of the speaker. Later on the
line swirls into a decameter – “The fat merchant offers me opium, kief, hashis,
even camel juice” to close back to jerky cluttering tetrameters when the time
comes to express the dissatisfaction and frustration gradually subduing from
fretfulness into sleep and melancholy – “pluck out my unreal teeth/ undress
my unlaughable self/ put to sleep this melancholy head?” (idem).
Elsewhere typography and caesuras divide the lines into imagistic and
cadence units that keep bumping across the crammed but indomitable
rhythmical feet, varying as whole verses between pentameter and heptameter
– and thus evoking the clatter and clamor on a battlefield as grafted on the
vision of elevation of a bird-like soul:
They will never die who fight so embraced
breath to breath eye to eye impossible to die
or move no light seeping through no maced arm
nothing but horse outpanting horse
shield
shield brilliant upon
all made starry by the dot ray of a helmeted eye
(“Uccello,” Ibidem 204)
The overall effect is overwhelming just as in a rock band that keeps time
but also alternates pauses with bars in which the whole group plunges into
explosive unisons with machinegun drumbeats, finally spiced with (usually
guitar) solos, in the style of “Achilles’ Last Stand” by Led Zeppelin (on the
Presence LP). Although the feet seem imperfect and irregular at times because
of the jagged structure they are actually always there as a sort of implied basic
beat – an implied (at times actual) metronomic rhythm that is also typical of
rock music as well. Both in rock and in poems like this one the basic rhythm
of the metronome is punctured by, veiled in, and clashed with the rhythm of
Ex Ponto nr.2, 2008
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