Metrical complexity in Don de la ebriedad

 Let's think about the factors of metrical complexity in Don de la ebriedad. 

Stress clashes: siempre la claridad viene del cielo / vida y labor propias 

Enjambment and line internal pauses.  

Frequent elision and syneresis. 

The overall effect is the creation of verse paragraphs, rather than a sequence of end-stopped lines. Generally, the sentences are long; or rather, sentence length is varied. The rhyme is there, but the rhyming words don't always end the syntactic phrase.  

Now, this is not particularly remarkable, except that it is, since Spanish poetry tends more to the end stopped line, and less to the development of longer structures. The exception is the development of the silva in the baroque, where the free combination of lines of seven and eleven create a fluidity that almost rivals English blank verse. 

Así el deseo. Como el alba, clara   [internal pause] 

desde la cima y cuando se detiene            [rhyme]

tocando con sus luces lo concreto

recién oscura, aunque instantáneamente.  [rhyme] [syneresis] 

Después abre ruidosas palomares   [stress clash] 

y ya es un día más, Oh, las rehenes  [enjambment between adjective and noun!]

palomas de la noche, conteniendo

sus impulsos altísimos. Y siempre... [rhyme] 

Así el deseo. Como el alba, clara desde la cima y cuando se detiene, tocando con sus luces lo concreto, recién oscura, aunque instantáneamente. Después abre ruidosas palomares y ya es un día más... 

There is a kind of sculpted quality to Lorca's lines, like "desnudo torso romano." Claudio Rodríguez doesn't tend to write individual sculpted lines of this type. But Rodríguez excels at the sequence of lines. All the more amazing because he was 17 when he wrote this book. The book bears some signs of youthful inexperience, but overall the mastery of verse is astonishing. 

Rancho gordo

 I bought a package of rancho gordo beans. They are $6 so not cheap (for beans) but it makes a good pot of soup that will last several meals. I saw this brank at my brother's house, who is mostly vegan for health reasons. They were brown, maybe kidney type beans. I first made a sofrito with onions, celery, and garlic. I added other vegetables, like peppers, tomatoes, and various herbs and spices that I thought would go well. A dash of soy sauce and some bullion cubes, and a dash of balsamic vinegar. I cooked the soup about three hours. The broth was rich and flavorful. We ate it with sourdough garlic toast and a salad of arugula, olives, olive oil, parmesan, and more balsamic vinegar. 

Piera

 "Now a heptasyllabic pattern ... will be undistinguishable from the lefthand colon of a Type A hendecasyllable" (p.54 ).  

I've been re-reading Carlos Piera's dissertation.  In my car, I was listening to two version of Lorca's "Cuerpo presente," by Margarita Xirgu and Germaine Montero, both of whom worked in the theater with Lorca. I was able to hear very clearly the pattern of the alexandrine (7 + 7). A few lines were harder to assimilate into the pattern: "los hombres de voz dura," for example. (The stress clash of voz dura.) If you said "aproximadamente" was a 7-syllable line, you wouldn't be wrong, but normally we would have a pattern of two accents, one on six (mandatory) and the other typically on 2, but possibly occuring on 1, 3, or 4 as well. "para que se acostumbre" would be an example from Lorca. The accent on the first syllable is weak because it is a preposition. 

A distinction between lines that reinforce the gestalt of the form and those that don't?  

I'm thinking of project on Lorca's prosody, but I haven't thought it to be very interesting, or yielding of insights that everyone might not have had already. One insight: enjambment only occurs in very short lines. Another: rhyme is frequent in all but a few works. Maybe mastery of classical meters is not that interesting?  

Dream of chess, Beckett, Proust...

I was in a library; I found a suitcase and in it a book titled British Chess.  (I don't play chess in real life but I sometimes try to solve the "checkmate in two moves" puzzles that appear on my Facebook page.) I took it out and went to the desk to check it out, though I knew it was wrong, since the suitcase wasn't mine.  The library employee was giving me the side eye. There was something about the game shown on one page that had held my attention and was to be the basis of some fruitful idea later.  

***

There were a series of misunderstandings about books about Beckett and Proust. I knew I was dreaming so I tried to retain the narrative in my mind, but at the end there was only a book devoted to one of these authors signed by the author, that my father was showing me. 

***

Later, I had a pet python, with large diameter. I was gentle and I had no fear of it, but I resented having to carry it around. 

Sister dream

 There was another sister dream last night.  I was in bed with family, and sister got pushed out on the opposite side where I was. (Next to my brother or daughter?).  She had a black eye from the fall from the bed. Then I remembered she was not alive any more.  

I've had many father dreams after his death, more than 20 years ago. It's not surprising to have dreams about my sister too.  Usually, they are about trying to reconcile myself to their death.  (Unsurprisingly). 

Bullshit

 https://digitalcommons.bau.edu.lb/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1173&context=schbjournal

I'm calling bullshit on this paper.  I can't read it, but the abstract is enough. 

Poetry reciting gun

 There was an instruction sheet on how to recite our poems that was vague; then I saw another section that it didn't matter whether the poems were in published books or not. 

Then apparently there was a huge gun that had to be assembled. I was grateful that a woman member or our team was doing this, quite efficiently.  The result was something like an assault rifle, but larger. Something wasn't quite right with the assembly, however, and she was on the phone with customer service.