"Singing in Her Song She Died
The trope of a SWAN SONG, particularly of a mute swan turned songful,..."
“Singing in Her Song She Died
The trope of a SWAN SONG, particularly of a mute swan turned songful, keeps its webbing hidden to protect the moving effect of its glide. Though a mute swan is less vocal than other swans, it will hiss, grunt, snort, and whistle. In the rigging of phonetics a GLIDE was a sound produced as the vocal organs moved toward or away from the articulation of a vowel or consonant, for example, the “y” sound detected in the seemingly single-syllable passage through the word, MUTE. In MUTE, the “y” sounded out in the approach to “u” disclosed another syllable in the word, like something salted away that could now be savored, the silence surrounding the word was holding back another fraction. GLIDING spoke of unpowered flight, of noiseless, smooth, continuous motion.”
- from Loom, by Sarah Gridley. This is one of the more argumentative prose poems in Gridley’s book, yet it operates on the same associative construct that the other poems use. In a way, Gridley teaches you, her reader, how to think about the poetic associations she uses in other poems. How should you be reading Gridley? I suppose this could be called an Ars Poetica type of poem, but without the (what can sometimes be) awkward gesturing to itself.
The trope of a SWAN SONG, particularly of a mute swan turned songful, keeps its webbing hidden to protect the moving effect of its glide. Though a mute swan is less vocal than other swans, it will hiss, grunt, snort, and whistle. In the rigging of phonetics a GLIDE was a sound produced as the vocal organs moved toward or away from the articulation of a vowel or consonant, for example, the “y” sound detected in the seemingly single-syllable passage through the word, MUTE. In MUTE, the “y” sounded out in the approach to “u” disclosed another syllable in the word, like something salted away that could now be savored, the silence surrounding the word was holding back another fraction. GLIDING spoke of unpowered flight, of noiseless, smooth, continuous motion.”
- from Loom, by Sarah Gridley. This is one of the more argumentative prose poems in Gridley’s book, yet it operates on the same associative construct that the other poems use. In a way, Gridley teaches you, her reader, how to think about the poetic associations she uses in other poems. How should you be reading Gridley? I suppose this could be called an Ars Poetica type of poem, but without the (what can sometimes be) awkward gesturing to itself.
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