![]() Self-knowledge can as easily destabilize as stabilize, of course so while turns without consequent “re-turns” can undoubtedly be rhetorically effective, intellectually provocative, and technically superlative, what such gestures cannot do is exercise the mirroring function of all seeing and all language (a function that structurally stabilizes even as it rhetorically immobilizes). Many of the poems we admire most exhibit a sort of reflexive responsiveness-they’re aware of the poetics that formed them, and they bear the sometimes symmetrical, sometimes asymmetrical marks of that self-awareness. Sometimes this is accomplished by duplication of the volta, sometimes by its contradiction, sometimes even by that sleight-of-hand/bait-and-switch in which a presumptive volta is subsequently revealed to be little more than an unremarkable bend in a poem’s organic crookedness. With this in mind, I’d say that the turns that have interested me most as both a reader and a writer of poetry are those that produce symmetry by somehow undercutting the volta’s rhetorical force. ![]() Any “but” can be followed by yet another “but” that renders the first logically and even grammatically inoperative. Just so, the turns of lyric poems, however dramatic, may be erased through the same linguistic operations that birthed them. If we take the volta to be a turn of thought effectuated by a turn in language, we must also note that any thought or speech-act-even performative ones-can as easily be undone. Inasmuch as symmetry has long been an important element of the lyric, when I think of poetic turns I think, too, of “re-turns” for every strophic movement there is a corresponding antistrophic one, just as every volta promises the possibility of a “re-volta,” a small rebellion (if you’ll forgive the cuteness) against the presumed singularity of the volta as well as narrative and intellectual presumptions of progress and linearity. Seth Abramson on Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger Posted on March 21, 2013
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