By M Leahy. I can’t quote from it, nor detail the procedures used in composition, because I’ve lost the book, which I haven’t finished yet. I like how the poems do at times demand you read them via the compositional procedures, and how this at least gestures at the rest of the work.
Form for me is how to read.
The difficulty I have with it is trying to identify the whole, what I am reading the poem for; the relation of each identified fragment to all the others. I would suggest that is found in the failure of the voice.
What is ‘voice’? If we think of “voice” in these poems as variations in the difficulty of identifying fragments, procedures etc., by the reader, then, as that means voice intrinsically involves form, this collection may be seen as a continuation of Pound’s project.
We may then consider Pound’s poems in terms of their superficial aspect, identified in The New Sentence, of fragments formed incoherently, that is around the need to identify their source, and Pound’s poetry as formally a poetry of voice.
I read this collection as a continuation of that, one in which the deeper coherence to quotation, a hermetic order or critical appropriation of the original, does not really exist: the voice fails because it is just voice.
Read next to Pound, this is an interesting deconstruction (it seems Leahy intended it to be “sounded / performed / read in that present without inclination back to a source / origin or forward to a conclusion / resolution”).