prosody’s handmaid

“The impulse that originally gave us the prose poem, in fact, beginning with Aloysius Bertrand and predecessors, then shaped by the surrealists and progeny, was the drive to disconnect from the rigidity of formal rules that bound French poetry. Ultimately, the disconnection extended to reason itself, which surrealist originators saw as prosody’s handmaid.”

~Barry Silesky, “Structure in Prose Poems?”, Sentence 2

Handmaid and handmade.

I am excited by disconnection. Gaps.

I am excited by an example of stubborn willful insistence on disconnection from reason. Not in an insane way. In a stubborn, pissed-off way, that says “Well, what has reason done for me lately?” Forget the fact that you can’t live without it.

Sometimes I get a notion that I need to study, really study, in a disciplined way, figure out who the really smart authors are, synthesize, analyse, develop a personal philosophy without any holes, impermeable, beyond reason because so well reasoned. The ANSWER. Alleluia!

Well, no laughter there.
Unreasonable as the fretful tulip,
in search of the mantic companions.