Saturday 12 January 2008

Peter Cole's "One to Bet: A Jerusalem Pamphlet"

A few days ago I finished reading Peter Cole's What Is Doubled: Poems 1981-1998 (Shearsman, 2005), and tonight I copied favourite passages into my journal, page after page--my hand aches!

The work I admire most is the prose poetry sequence, "One to Bet: A Jerusalem Pamphlet," surely one of the best prose poetry sequences I've ever read. Of course that raises the question, How many prose poetry sequences have you read, Carrie? I'm not sure, but I think I'll continue believing this to be one of the best prose poetry sequences I've read for a long time to come.

Here are a few quotations from that sequence (which fail to give any sense of the power of the whole):


"Conducive to ambling, the street, like the sound of its name, was something of a refuge for me from all things linear...."

"In the fin-de-siรจcle suck of unknowing...our increasingly pathetic idea of an origin."

"Priests, then, in the evolution of tribes that number stand-up comics among them also. So it is that one comes upon curiously vaudeville qualities in the most serious of fifth or eighth century rabbinical texts."

"...where one always pays twice, in the unfair economies of song."

"And thinking is infinite, and the angel a ladder leaned against it."

"So that the word itself, ahava [love], is like the medieval wheel of fortune that spins one into the vertigo of the full circle in motion. In medieval picture books the figures on the wheel cling as desperately when they near the top as when they begin their descent toward the foul-smelling slough of despond."

"...establishing the Edenic origin of the flinch between innocence and wit along the shifting length of the serpent."






1 comment:

  1. "So that the word itself, ahava [love], is like the medieval wheel of fortune that spins one into the vertigo of the full circle in motion. In medieval picture books the figures on the wheel cling as desperately when they near the top as when they begin their descent toward the foul-smelling slough of despond."

    Love this!

    ReplyDelete