die textförmige hängematte eines bizarren augenblicks

review von: ann cotten

I actually liked the poem a lot better before reading the anecdote you provided in lieu of reason for this form of existence (i'd like to read more about how the opportunity or sentiment led you to exactly this formal strategy). 
It may be my taste, but I like it like Hegel, when the ambiguity (People! Read William Empson: 7 Types of Ambiguity! https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.215758 ) allows a physical-reality anecdotal reading and at the same time a very abstract one. And somehow this works better before hearing the "story behind the poem" (like those incredibly boring poets who introduce their anecdotal poems at readings in almost the same words as the poem then repeats). Why? I think because of course I assume or surmise that there is probably some concrete scene, moment or anecdote behind this imagery, but I can do the experiment of building in my own imagination a kind of cubist scene using exactly what the words say, plus of course my own experience. As soon as I hear about your experience, I let go, of course, it's about this, "and nothing more" as Wordsworth writes about "Peter Bell", and so the poem becomes a bit more lackluster and banal, threadbare, the exciting intersubjective moment, where it was like the words were like surgical instruments in someone elses hands doing something in my brain, is gone, and I accept like a good neighbor that this is about you, not me, and then I lose interest. 

Put differently: as linguistic object, again this poem is quite delicious. the repetitions, the sounds of the consonents, almost sound like the whish of a knife, repeatedly, on a board (how! how!) (especially to the bilingual ear of course: hau! hau!) and then the eye that keeps rolling around on the board and one keeps missing it with the knife (edging slices/leaves) and I see how turning a page slices my consciousness, my time. 

"wouldn't this rustle" as a last line sounds like, suddenly, the voice of my Aunt Cena "isn't that wonderful!" - somehow the colloquial rhetoric, the deictic "this" and the "isn't this fun"-onomatopoetic "rustle" ends the poem on a, for me, too familiar-sounding note. Like Andrew McGough, poems for children, or was it Richard, a playful familiarizing with the whole world that hurts my tase because it kills the sense of awe and wonder with which I think personally we need to approach the world. Otherwise it all is tugged down andcommodified to the deadened filter of an american backyard, in other words, we don't feel or taste it but only keep reassuring and confirming our own colloquialisms.