Would this poem by Miroslav Holub be good for the elective Into the world?and any techniques?
The techniques Holub is using in this poem are mostly too modern to have established names. There is some use of Anaphora – in the repeated first line to each verse; though even here it could be argued convincingly that what Holub is actually doing is referencing the iterative structure of folk poems and folk tales (the House that Jack built would be an example of an iterating folkrime in English). The poem is heavily indebted to a movement which had no formal name at the time this piece was written, but has since been called Minimalism. (Holub avoids any adjectives, or description of any sort, until the very end of the poem). Holub is also using a sophistication of the framebreaking technique (where someone in the poem refers to something they can’t know: the way the Fool in King Lear refers to events which haven’t yet happened at the time of that play). Holub’s technique is really frame destruction, since nearly all of the poem happens in a wholly imaginary realm (it is all ‘maybe ..
