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Unread 03-14-2003, 12:15 AM
Joseph Bottum Joseph Bottum is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Hot Springs, South Dakota
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A constant amazement to me is how Rhina Espaillat gets away with enormously complicated sentences without losing the air of grammatical simplicity. I keep thinking it's a trick, that one has simply to see through it, like a man who knows how the conjuror works. Except it isn't a trick. It's actually her unique voice--and nobody but she can do it

Look at the first of this sonnet's four sentences: "What bird are you, repeating 'Here! Here! Here!' and later, 'What to do!' as if distraught, and 'What to do!' again?" The question mark ought to be too far away for us to remember that this started as a question. The verb "repeating" shouldn't carry through to mean the bird's trilling "What to do!" later--and if the verb did somehow describe what the bird was doing later, then the "again" ought to be redundant.

Or look at the last sentence: "And still I hear you say the things you say, swear I could almost knock on your green door, as if you meant it and I knew what for." Either "hear" or "swear" ought to be a participle, and the singular "it" seems to refer to the plural "things."

Meanwhile, we get a sentence like the third: "Almost unseen, your feathered self, aware of nothing but each pressing circumstance--each straw for your light carpentry midair--tosses out songs in passing, line by line not consciously, but idly thrown away on strangers' ears as ignorant as mine." Who else do we know besides Milton who'd let 14 words slip between the subject and the verb?

It's funny to call Rhina a logic poet, but the secret of this verse has something to do, I think, with the straightforwardness of the thoughts she expresses. Not that the thoughts are simple, but she always puts the elements of those thoughts in the right order, and the logic carries the reader through the grammatical thickets without any sense that they actually are thickets.

Unless you examine it closely, you almost don't notice the complicated string of particles and conjunctions flying by: "and...as if...and...and yet...neither...nor...but...and...but...but...and still...as if...and"--just in this poem. Classical Greek poetry works this way, too. In Rhina's work, as in Greek, a great deal of work is being done in the particles and conjunctions--as it always is in logic (which the Greeks invented, too, for that matter).

For my money, that makes the second sentence archetypal: "And yet it's clear you're neither calling me nor overwrought, but occupied, and singing quite by chance." Only the most delicate balancing of conjunctions could fit all that into one sentence, and because they are delicately balanced--which is to say that all the elements of the thought are in the right order--we slide without even noticing through the chiasmus of present participle, past participle, past participle, present participle: "calling...overwrought...occupied...singing." The comma after "occupied" is the only weak moment here, for it is a breathing comma and actually weakens the balancing act. But I see why she did it: It sets off the phrase "singing quite by chance," and I can hear in my mind Rhina reading that phrase, with the hint of a pause after "singing" and that little rising pitch of accent she uses to hit the word "quite."

What she'd have us believe, of course, is that she's the one who's singing quite by chance, with that note of ingenuous simplicity she often sounds. But those who've read her know better. The complexity of simplicity is what she always pulls off.

Jody
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