Perhaps I’ve gotten poetry wrong
I was thinking underfoot                   built for the agora

But it’s also of the study isn’t it – also dense –

xxxxxWarm rooms in winter
xxxxxNotes in the margins

I think I was forsaking metaphor because I thought it was category slippage, fun in
xxxxxlife but sloppy on the page –

xxxxxBriefly taking heat for a commodity – they get forsythia here?
xxxxxBut it’s notxxx it’s a glut –

Or poetry that’s focused on the bands inside the solids
Interior where nothing happily consists

Arsenic and bismuth and antimony
The Beatles – The Turtles – The Supremes

A poetry of line breaks

Yes and loving
Valved carotid shunting structures is a way to go

I prefer a chatter not quite cognitive though lately I can hear it coming – the chatter
xxxxxin my head is period style

That on the Northeast Regional there should be this Danish house
That strobing light through branches make me seize

Doped conduction                    ready for the long haul

It’s almost summer and I’m coming home

  For J.H. Prynne

____
Chris Nealon lives in Washington, DC, and teaches at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of two books of poems, The Joyous Age and Plummet, as well as two books of literary criticism. His poem The Dial will be published by The Song Cave in March 2012.

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