We make no secret of our enjoyment of David Jaffin’s work. We admire the range and the ambition of it–and often its music. We encourage our readers to seek his collections out–many available from Shearsman Books via the Shearsman site, or in the U.S. via SPD. A few posts ago we reprinted some excerpts from his latest work, Intimacies of Sound.

Today we received the following interesting letter from the poet:

Dear Jesse,

As we have neither t.v. nor a computer, nor internet, I just learned of what you brought on [sic] my poetry in November of last year and my part-response on Cid Corman last March. First of all, many many thanks for taking an interest in my poetry! I think a response here is necessary: 1) What I write large (capitalize) is to emphasize and that’s what I do 2) these lines and stanza breaks are certainly not “willy-nilly” for I am interested in a contrapunctal interweaving sense, of meaning, also using the ambiguity of language 3) the hyphen I use in two ways: the normal way of interlocking words together such as “time-sensing”, but I also use the hyphen with a hard break, not a soft one, between words at the line-break.

Could it be, that you have Cormaned me [sic] into his use of line, language and the like:

Reading
through

the eyes of
others is

why glasses
need be indi

vidually pre
scribed.

I am deeply interested in what you write on my poetry and would like to keep up-to-date on it. A specialist for internet here, who does it for the Bundepost, is a dear friend of mine and could out-gobble [sic] for me. hope all is well with you and yours

DJ.

We have a good tape of David reading his poetry which we hope to feature on Ahadada Radio once we establish it here on the site. Interestingly enough, though Mr. Jaffin is a wonderful reader, his line breaks and hard and soft usages of the hypen do not appear in the performance of his work–i.e. he does not stop, or drop his voice to signal the line breaks or those hard and soft hypens he tells us about in his letter. Of course, this does not detract from the integrity of Jaffin’s reading style, but it does give one pause.

One suggestion that we would like to offer is that he publish his explanation of why he breaks and capitalizes and hyphenates the way he does in a kind of key or “forward” to his books so that readers will correctly interpret the work. However, the question immediately comes to mind: How should readers be expected to “correctly” read the poetry, when Jaffin himself does not appear to follow his own guide when he reads? These are inconsistencies that perhaps the poet will address in a future letter.

As far as Cormanizing Jaffin’s poetry, we believe that every poem written in English when read by someone familiar with the canon of English language poetry risks comparison with every other poet who has contributed to that body of work. If we are guilty of “izing” Jaffin’s work, then we are also guity of Donneizing, Wyattizing, Campionizing, Laxizing, etc. etc., it.

All of this aside, David Jaffin is a fine poet and we are very happy to promote discussions about his work.