Seven Types of Accuracy
Richard Moore · The Iowa Review · 1983
IN THE BEGINNING there were Seven Types of Ambiguity, and these mated with the sweet compliant earth and begat the Seven Heavens of modern poetry.And poetry, we all know, is radically different from prose.Prose?The sort of language epitomized, say, by a theorem in geometry.Exact scientific language.Civilized artificial language, removed from our primitive roots.Poetry, as Gary Snyder tells us, goes back to the Paleolithic.Prose only goes back to Plato.author (the dreamer?) of the Pygmies' Elephant Hunting Song?the Pygmies of what was once the Belgian Congo.They may not be there any more; but when they were there?for the thousands of years they were there?they used to kill elephants with spears.The tribe would gather around an enormous stray from the herd and distract him with a lot of noise.Then before the befuddled beast became enraged, the 152