Charlie Conway

Poetry with an unusual structure is hard to pull off. When it's done well, it's great, summoning images of Baudelaire. Charlie Conway is one such poet. His work in the poetry journal Apocryphal Text here is a great look at a modern, very moving work.

I especially love his poem "The Act of Being Eaten", which is here. The way he draws out his lines is so exact and well chosen; he's like Eliot after Pound's help:
w i t h  n i g h t p e a c h e s

His distant layout of the line "in the tree branches" with the focus on Orfeo is just perfect [ie. Orpheus, recalling the incredible 1959 Portuguese language film Orfeu Negro or Black Orpheus, about Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; it was directed by the Frenchman Marcel Camus.]

His ending is really interesting as well, a great sense of personal feeling and the drives that motivate us all [whether we listen to them or not]:

The                        onion             has             no                end.
Hurricanes                                                                             dreaming.

Love has nomadness.


Even his little footnotes are well chosen. I've ready many words with footnotes, and they are mostly just an annoying indulgence. They so often grate, but his were well-chosen. The first footnote is odd, open-ended and almost dreamlike, like the atmosphere of the film Last Year at Marienbad, and the second is perfect--it immediately calls to mind the simplistic, very post-modern marble Cycladic Greek statuary from around 2800 B.C., more info here, but make sure to really look at a lot of images on google image search or something so you see the wide variety of statue styles.