Word: staccato
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...suburbia, of seething, terror-ridden cities, are fiendishly accurate, easily recognizable, when the author departs from her subject long enough to make them. All of these catalogues of horrors, written in the kind of verse Time magazine would use if it used verse, are curiously striking. Even their unconnected, staccato prosiness and pseudo-cummings style ("if we can send a man to the moon we ought to / clean up the what do they black want / power student should be fire with fight now you / take of they just would law and listen/ . . .") are not always offensive...
LAST CHRITMAS I was in the Coop, looking desperately for a present for an old friend, and I picked up Bill Knott's Naonti Poems. I don't know what I was looking for-I suppose I was expecting another dose of tense, burdened lyricism, or brief, staccato bits of free verse machinery-but what I found was the clearest, purest, most unpretentious voice I'd come upon among younger poets. Knott's images were whole and satisfying: for once words were the things they said they were. I bought the book and never gave it away...
Stravinsky's music is characterized by clarity, precision, ruthless concision, wild energy, and gaiety-Eliot's magical condition of complete simplicity. His musical sentences are always composed of complete units, which is why he manipulates prosody by syllable rather than word. He abhors sostenuto music, prefers staccato, the breaks of breath, which render every particle of every line crystalline. He does not admit superfluous notes, dynamic nourishes, believing that "gratuitous excess spoils every substance, every form that it touches." He is most traditional, and most original, in his use of severely-delineated polyphony, rhythm, text, and articulation. Stravinsky has always...
Within seconds, a sickening staccato of rifle fire signaled the transformation of a once-placid campus into the site of an historic American tragedy...
LONG TAKES are alternated with staccato bursts of images, much like the structure of Robert Lapoujade's brilliant Le Socrate . But in that film the quick cutting served as a form of chorus, while here the psychic icons of the central characters create a mosaic of emotional cross-references, used in turn to bore, startle, perplex, or electrify the viewer. The nature of these icons, which compose the main body of the film's formal statement, is too varied to effectively catalogue here, but includes a great deal of crude psycho-social imagery concerning the fall of idealism since...