Berrigan 1+2 // Elsewhere No. 2

While reading the first half of The Sonnets, his use of imagery really stood out to me. Especially lines like this: "Time flies by like a great whale (XXXIV)," and "Her aimlessness is the pulse of the tree (XVII)." For a lot of the sonnets, the fragmentation and jumbling just made it really hard to read. To be honest, I didn't read much more into them after I skimmed/read once over. When the imagery, or placement of lines, did catch my eye, I tried to interpret what the poem might be saying. I also tried, a couple times, to imagine what the original poem looked like. Overall, I wasn't completely moved by it, but I would have to admit that's partly because I didn't spend much time with it. Also, the introduction was pretty cryptic, so I wasn't sure what I was in for. It did build up pretty well, though.

In the second half, the imagery still stood out for me. But one thing I didn't quite follow is the "storyline." All of a sudden sexual allusions are added and it's somewhat confusing. Then he jumps back to the second "In Joe Brainard's Collage," which I like better than the other one. LIX just flows better and makes a bit more sense. I was also waiting to see what lines would be repeated, as I also did while reading the first half. The imagery is so good, but the usual lack of readability gets in the way, more often than not, for me.

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The fact that the text and images were so diverse was pretty distracting. Despite that, though, I mostly enjoyed reading Elsewhere No. 2. The way the images flow makes me feel like a narrator is reading over a movie reel moving across town. That makes sense, though, since the notes were taken on a bus and what not. Some of the text also reminded me of our twitter poems, using a lot of found language. The images were pretty evocative and dimensional; I liked that aspect as well.