Jody Azzouni

Jody's Notes

This poem, and the ones I wrote around that time: suddenly this is how these poems were coming out. I stared at a couple of them (the first few) and asked myself: what am I doing? Because they were very different from what I'd done before. "If the dead give advice: patience is a virtue, tomorrow a habit; the igloo small, asylum against the continual whip of the second hand." Is that supposed to be a sentence?

I had to live with them for a while. Before I accepted them, before I understood. Notice what's key. It's not that this purported sentence is meaningless, or that its meaning somehow eludes us, or something like that. (Many poets do stuff like that; many poets are proud of the fact that they do something like that.)  The purported sentence is full of metaphor, of course; it's allusive (e.g., to clocks, and more generally, to time); yet its meaning  (all things considered) is pretty clear, pretty straightforward, pretty plain.

I reprinted this poem in my collection The Lust for Blueprints.