Thursday, September 24, 2009

Easy Green Proof Part 4

In the fourth section of the poem, the line "Familiar as far as exhaustion" was deleted from

A single day
Familiar as far as exhaustion
In the life of a test pilot

to make

A single day
In the life of a test pilot

I was making use of deliberately awkward locutions all over the place when I wrote "Easy Green Proof," trying to imitate the deliberately awkward but perfect locutions of Ron Padgett, I think. It's strange how silly insincerity ages in almost exactly the same way as the sincerest expressions of inner life: some things pass time's test, some don't, and sometimes not passing is just a matter of one's current frame of mind, not of the words themselves...

Maybe as I was editing, and from the vantage of three years of parenthood, I just didn't think I had had the right, as a slacker in his twenties, to make any statements, ironic or otherwise, about the familiarity of exhaustion.

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