NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
ToOn " Index" Paul Vol To say that the form and subject of " Index" came to me simultaneously and continued to modify each other as I wrote the poem, may sound a bit convenient, but that is what usually happens when I use a prose form. I had been reading an autobiography I forget whose, a completely unnecessary book by an egregiously self-indulgent manage I noticed that the authors egotism even seeped into the end papers, especially the index which by condensing his life seemed to magnify his faults. A different character came to mind, one who was not quite the master of his fate, and an index, with its fragmentary lines, suggested a way to catch both the quick, haphazard changes such a character would endure and his increasingly scrambled perception of them. As I assembled the poem it began to resemble a chronology. This helped define the character more clearly for me and gave the static index, which was developing imagistic ally, a linear movement as well. The page numbers, initially tacked on as decoration, worked like dates, punctuating the events they paralleled.
From then on it was like a run of blind luck in putting a jigsaw puzzle together. The pieces fell into place with little shifting or revision. By going back and indenting all the lines after the first I hoped to imply that the poem was an extract from an index to a larger book, a collection of lives that never made it into Vasari. One change that seems trivial, quirky, in retrospect was misspelling Angiolieris name (it often appears with variant spelling) but I was going on the impression that indexes are not as carefully proofread as texts.
In a way, when I use a prose form I feel Im adapting a persona, one that speaks a mock-prose. With " Index" I knew Id set-off and continued to play-off an " argument" between the neutral if not deadpan tone and the wild particulars of the life it described. With regard to formal considerations, how much is a deliberate choice and how much just happens I cant say, but when I do use such forms I assume Im employing a simple metaphor, a familiar if not trite context yet a very accessible one, by which I dont mean to celebrate the ordinary but to subvert it. From Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 65 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems. Ed. David Lehman.
New York: Macmillan, 1987. Copyright? 1987 by David Lehman.
Free research essays on topics related to: index, 1987, prose
Research essay sample on Quot Index Quot David Lehman One