Uncanny Couplets

I recently purchased a lit mag called Cranky at Pegasus in downtown Berkeley and then proceeded to take it home and read through it cover to cover (at least as far as poetry was concerned), interview and book reviews included. With exception of the books written of in the reviews, I think it would be accurate to say I had never read any of the poets represented in Cranky before. I can't say enough how often I sit down to read a magazine and put it down. I feel sort of jaded a lot of the times when it comes to literary magazines. I can't help wondering if the fact that these poets in Cranky are, for me at least, working under the radar screen allows them to be more imaginative in the way they present subject matter, etc.

For me, though, the most satisfying moment came in a poem by Julie Doxsee called 'Unfold.'

Here's the couplet I'm talking about:

out to be the hungry noises
you would whisper into my


If only I knew more about grammar I could talk about that floating my without its other part. Of course, the other part comes at the beginning of the next line after the stanza break. But whenever a poet breaks a line on a word that normally serves to qualify another word, I, as the reader, am left in a state of uncanny fulfillment. Suddenly 'my' (or 'those,' 'these,' 'your,' etc., even 'the' or 'and') becomes a complete entity in and of itself, not just conjunction or pronoun but noun. This is especially accentuated here coming as 'my' does at the end of a couplet.

Splitting up the 'my' from what it qualifies serves another purpose, I think. Here's the next couplet:

mouth if the pretty
omissions died.

'Mouth if.' Hmmm. Suggesting that the mouth is not a sure thing at all and its existence is instead qualified by the action of another entity. Which echoes, it seems, the unwillingness of the 'my' to affix itself to the 'mouth.' Maybe for safety's sake, for self-preservation? I never thought about those 'yours' and 'thoses' and 'theses' at the end of lines as forming a protectorate of sorts. A way to shore up the speaker within the lyric, whatever that could mean. A way to remain undefined by additional entity.