So, yeah. If you’ve read anything I’ve written about...

So, yeah. If you’ve read anything I’ve written about poetry, you might know I’m a fan of the breathlessness. The poem that likes to ride and ride into a poetry continuum. And it’s not stopping. Don’t stop poetry continuum. I LIKE THE BREATHLESS, AND I CANNOT LIE!!

This is a breathless-ish poem from Kimberly Grey that appeared in last winter’s A Public Space. And what draws me to this poem is the combination of breathless with syntactic qualification. Which is something I’ve seen done really well in poems by Laura Eve Engel’s (many of her poems, Read this really fun one here). Maybe I’m making the term “syntactic qualification.” What does it mean? Reusing a word later in a sentence so that the original appearance of the word feels curtailed by repetition rather than amplified by repetition. There aren’t a lot of examples in this poem by Grey. Even where Grey repeats “people” about a third of the way through, the people is more anaphoric than curtailing. For me, it’s more the sensibility of Grey’s poem that reminds me of Laura Eve’s poems. I also hear it in Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s.

The sense I’m describing is like being contained in a padded intellectual chamber. Or like my consciousness is in a 1980s video game where the computer just keeps turning me 30 degrees at various intervals.