Saturday, May 2, 2009

Joyce, Syntax and another S.U.R.G.. meeting



Writing as performance. Reader as audience. Free to sit back and enjoy, or marvel at the skill, or use the experience as a free master class...a bit like listening to Martin Simpson playing the guitar...

This I love:

Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince's stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince's stores.

It's the grammatical slippage of dullthudding I think, as much as anything else. Exactly what it's doing in that first sentence is ambigious? It seems to have become an adjective in the second. The rhythm and sound seem near on perfect.

Which does raise the question: for someone who was so inventive with syntax, why was his poetry so dull?

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