01-30-2014, 07:38 AM
Quote:Vibratory verve of the alto sax
expelled coercively from asthmatic lungs,
frenetically floating buoyed on the singing
of las lenguas de chicas bonitas,
humping that Brazilian Basso Nova bass line,
bounding off garden walls as ivies climb,
up the pulsing beat to the stars,
then falling out towards
diagonally parked cars
where Congress and Mary Street do it in the road.
This sentence left me feeling cheated with its long stack of helper particles/adjectives, and adverbs. The syntax towards the end of the sentence seems to deteriorate as well. Is "do" the verb; is the verve doing "it" in the road? What is "it"? Or is it an incomplete sentence with Congress and Mary Street doing "it" in the road. I tend to think it's the former—because, although I have no clue what it is, I can't imagine Streets actually doing anything—if that's the case it is an extremely week and ambiguous verb for such a long sentence, and I'm left out of the loop on whatever it is the subject actually did. Simple present may be better, what you have here may be the world's longest incomplete verb clause that just stacks on a bunch of helpers, and the does nothing with them. I can't get past it to get into the rest of the poem.

