I’ve been spending the holiday weekend alternately working through the second
volume of Taylor Branch’s magisterial trilogy-biography of M. L. King, and
(while resting the eyes) taking in an audiobook of Thomas Pynchon’s
paranoid-conspiracy novel Bleeding Edge.
The two works could scarcely be more different; yet, in a
familiar phenomenon, co-temporal intake produces bouillabaisse-style mental
blends.
Thus: Branch’s
historical-archival work is straightforward
in approach, and sober in style -- he is no phrase-maker -- yielding almost
nothing by way of “found poetry” or excerptable monostichs. Yet here is one line that could have
sprung from Pynchon’s pen:
A
slow tide of crisis
spread
pressures and counterpressures
to
odd places
at
great remove.
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