Peter J. Grieco: "April in Harvard Yard"

April in Harvard Yard
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“The task of a linguist is not to tell us 
what sentences mean, but to explain how 
they have the meanings speakers give them.”*
 
Striking symmetries & anti-symmetries 
tedious anxieties, balanced utterances, moldy 
ceilings, salient contrasts, loathsome spiders
rigid restrictions, despotic anguish: 
It’s as if a well-made poem required 
an identifiable pivot somewhere 
between monstrueux & voluptueux.
“In other words, the relation between 
an initial state & a final one is correlated
with the opposition between initial problem 
& final solution.” Or else none of this goes
anywhere & I would not know what to do
with myself in Presbourg at six in the morning.

*epigraph from Jonathan Culler's 1975 book Structuralist Poetics

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Peter J. Grieco is a retired English professor and former school bus driver. His poems have been widely published in small magazines on-line and in print. His book length series of poems include: “At the Musarium,” a collection of semi-procedural verse based on word frequency lists, “Misinterpretations of Dreams,” a series which interrogates Freud's seminal study of dream life, "Structuralist Poetics," which attempts to come to terms with post-structuralism, & "A Week on the Concord & Merrimac." celebrating Thoreau. His collection of ekphrastic verse, “The Blind Man's Meal,” is available from Finishing Line Press.