Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Comparative Playground Reform

Here's an exercise we might do. Take Alan Hammond's "Playground Injuries: Statistics and Prevention" and compare it to the "poem" that appears on page 3 of Invisible Bride, which appeared in the journal No.

What makes Hammond's piece prose and Tony's piece poetry? Does it make sense to say that the difference is that Tony "versifies"? If so, what do we mean by that? The answer is going to be, I think, that Hammond writes with a kind of institutional earnestness that Tony does not. The poem "writhes", as I recently said, in its institutional constraints. But how does it manage this act of turning against the immediacy of the playground, and the obviousness of the need for playground reform?

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