The materials are the artifacts
and the art of fact,
the matter of truth
and the truth of matter.
It plays the language
within (or is it against?)
the memory of the event
or the event of memory,
the way the little cushion
still cups like two open hands
in the stern of the boat
where years ago he laid
his drowsy head.
It speaks the no
to fiction
and the fiction of
no,
the way we all make
believe our renunciations.
believe our renunciations.
I think this is a great title for a poem and generally speaking I like the structural idea of playing with the tension inherent in the union of phonological forms. However, I think that the poem would benefit if the reader had a heads up of authorial awareness from the start, a quick wink before the first try. For that reason I'd suggest experimenting with flipping stanzas 3 and 4 and 1 and 2. There's a monkish humor in this enterprise that reminds me of of the 9th century Irish poem Pangur Ban: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/pangur-ban.html. The final line of that poem, "turning darkness into light" breaks into new epistemological and existential territory in the same way this poem does with its final couplet. I think this break between make and believe is the most successful of the pairing plays. I'm not sure whether this is because it is not dependent on sound comparison, or because it ruptures a unitary term, rather than yoking a pair, or because the elision between construction and belief under the final shadow of renunciation makes the received weight of this stanza heavier than it looks, which is of course seems to be the trick and concern of the poem as a whole.
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