Reluctant Gravities: Poems

by Waldrop, Rosmarie

• ISBN13: 9780811214285
• ISBN10: 0811214281
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-10-17
• Publisher: New Directions

Summary

Once again poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop pushes the boundaries and definitions of poetry, prose, gender, relationship, even language itself in her new volume of prose poem "dialogues", Reluctant Gravities. Intended as a sequel to The Reproduction of Profiles and Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities gives the rhetorical "you" addressed in those earlier volumes a voice and response. "I decided to give the second person equal time", says Waldrop. "But I'm not interested in characters, psychology, or in poetry's traditional 'persona' or mask. The voices do not 'represent, ' but frame the synaptic space between them". Some of Waldrop's concerns are formal. She "cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference" in her attempts to compensate for the lack of a margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not. Her "gap gardening tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text". But the point of the dialogues is purely human as the two voices with wit and philosophical playfulness debate aspects of "Aging",

Table of Contents

Prologue: Two Voices	1	(9)
I
On the Horizontal	9	(2)
On the Vertical	11	(2)
On Vertigo	13	(2)
On Place	15	(10)
Song	19	(1)
Meditation on Fact	20	(2)
Song	22	(3)
II
On Eden	25	(2)
On Desire	27	(2)
On Thirds	29	(2)
On Betweens	31	(10)
Song	35	(1)
Meditation on Certainty	36	(2)
Song	38	(3)
III
On Varieties of Oblivion	41	(2)
On Separation	43	(2)
On Depth	45	(2)
On Hieroglyphs	47	(10)
Song	51	(1)
Meditation on Understanding	52	(2)
Song	54	(3)
IV
On Ways of the Body	57	(2)
On Blindman's Buff	59	(2)
On Sharing	61	(2)
On Change	63	(10)
Song	67	(1)
Meditation on the Indefinite	68	(2)
Song	70	(3)
V
On Lift	73	(2)
On Depression	75	(2)
On Childhood	77	(2)
On Pattern	79	(10)
Song	83	(1)
Meditation on Awakening	84	(2)
Song	86	(3)
VI
On Slowing	89	(2)
On Aging	91	(2)
On Cause	93	(2)
On the Millennium	95