boars and fury

coincidental post three on time

DP: Every sentence written in English contains some anxiety about time. I’d love to write a poem that was Time-Free. Is that possible?

RZ: Why? Is this particular to English?

DA: I don’t think English is necessarily the only language in which time is embedded in the verbs. But I know that in Mandarin it’s easy to make a sentence that doesn’t tell you at what time things happened. And I wish that were possible in English. A sentence in English begins and ends; it has direction; it carries you, relentlessly, toward a period, a place of death. It’s why I avoided sentences for so long in my poems–because I didn’t want to feel like I was living out a sentence.

(D.A. Powell and Rachel Zucker, interview, Poetry Foundation)