Casting Sequences

Language that engenders sense rather than depicting sense is the poetic assumption of "Casting Sequences". By presupposing, like the Surrealists and the French Symbolists, that language is experience and not just a defective substitute for it, Marjorie Welish elevates the medium of words. In lyrics driven at times by sound associations, at other times by style and literariness, these poems move freely among matters germane to the writing and reading of poetry itself. Placing language at the centre of consciousness, Welish's lines bespeak her conviction that words are the medium by which we bring ourselves into being and then are extinguished. These poems offer the reader an array of encounters with the provocative play of language.