GLACIER POLISH—granite of the Wallowa batholith

ON THE IDEAL OF CYSTALLINE PROSE

(1) The more in tune with the worlds of nature and the mind a culture
becomes, the fewer and fewer words
will be needed to say ever-more important things.

(2) Who is to say which is more important:
the blackbird’s song,
or the silence just after.

For me, poetry at its best seems to appear out of the snowy quiet of the
blank page. The meanings of this subtle movement of emergence are
many. Each sound, each word, each image, is given thereby a certain
weight, a certain importance. The rhythms, the rhymes, the repeti-
tions, all come together collectively to form the mysterious composite
movement of sound and sense which is each poem’s signature, and
is as unique as the one-of-a-kind species geometry of a flower, or the
unmistakable characteristic flight patterns of birds.

By contrast, how out-of-shape and verbose does our contemporary
prose seem to me. Iit seems to suffer not just from a surfeit of cheap
printer’s ink, or web-page electrons, but also from a truescarcity—a
decline to near extinction, really—of seasoned, well-practiced musicians
among both writers and readers. So now we compose mainly with and
for the eye, and not for the ear. This evidently encourages these
run-on, endlessly mechanical lines that no longer pause, like a good
singer, to take a quiet breath.

How different the more musical ideal of more with less, I would say,
very much more with less. By this I mean crafting each sound, each
word, each phrase, like one might carefully polish a multi-facetted
crystal of clear quartz. Reading such prose, one finds oneself pondering
ideas and thoughts, and turning phrases over in one’s mind in a space full
of emptiness and silence, just as one might hold the crystal itselr up to
the light and admire the wonders of its form.

It's true: this is but an ideal, and a hard one to achieve at that. But all the
same, I think it’s well worth considering.

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