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5 December 2005: In his Broken Poems for Evita (The Runaway Spoon Press, 1997), John Elsberg has this slyly comic but also lyrically charming specimen of syllabroken, infraverbally fused texts with case-reversals:
RAISING EVA
(Or, the myth of art and politics)
L
EVITA
tio nis
th EPRE
fer
RED al TERN
at ivefor
thosewhona t UR
ALLY S
inK
I love the way Evita (the heroine of Elsberg's book) is levitated (and, to my ear, legerdemained). Interesting little visiophor of the main body of text rising out of "inK," too.
Also in the collection is this amusing, very Cummingsesque slant on prudery:
THE ESSENCE OF VICTIORIAN LIT.
Little Ms.
maiden
head all p
er
t &
pri
m satonher
crumpettoo
I came across a copy of "RAISING EVA" while actually making headway against my house's disarray. It was on some bad printings of pages for his book that I was going to use as scrap paper. Anyway, it reminded me that I wanted to mention John as one of the many innovative poets who owed something to Cummings in my essay on Cummings's influence (still not quite done), and had forgotten to. Now he's in the essay--and here.
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