It is fascinating to think about how grammar, and sentence, create a momentum by manipulating syntax. Those wily academic sentences that pile one subordinate clause onto another succeed when they know how to build the tension of the sentence's momentum, and then release it. It's a beautiful thing, really. Often enough it alone can stretch the intelligence, and widen the concept the writer has in mind.
Geoffrey G. O'Brien's poem in the September/October 2009 issue of Boston Review relies upon the momentum created by a sentence. But the sentences in O'Brien's "Poem Beginning to End" are not participating in a closed system. And what I mean is not just that the sentences can point in multiple directions, it's that the sentences that get started are derailed, usually as the function of a line break, but sometimes mid-line. But, and here is the magic of the poem, most of the time it doesn't feel as though there is anything grammatically irregular. Yes, there are distinct moments when I feel disoriented reading the poem, but O'Brien maintains enough consistency with the images, like men, a cup, some house, that I feel as though I'm still in the same general location.
And so I'm left with a vague sense of disagreement. I'm assuming the speaker can feel that all these people around him don't really have a common purpose, and they're not going to find one, because they're not all that interested in it. For me, this unhinged grammar is meant to make me feel unsettled, the same limbo that the speaker is in. Yes, meaning cannot be produced by a poem that defies the mechanics of communicating, but I can still claim a sense of what this all means. And for me there is value in that.
Related Links:
Boston Review
Green and Gray