Fanny Howe selected poems

It is an intriguing position to be in when you return to a book you have read a few times before and find that when you read if for the third time or fifth time you are reading a book you don’t remember reading before. Language has acted beyond memory or reveals a new layer of recollection.

Sometimes it feels like intimate life can split the fundamentals of recollection and redistributed it in a new way – the old bridge is now a runway; the fountain by the park bench is now a column holding up a parking building; the house with fresh blue paint on the sills rests as a toy in the stream. I’m probably being overly surreal. But, sometimes not only the function of words seems to have changed but the very actions of words; there is a sense of things reorientated to be recognized; a sort of vigilant near-sighting. The actions that prepare other actions have redeployed the chemistry of assumption, prejudice, the exit squeaks – I write for the second time, the personal craving of silence is dust, and find it slicks the foot of a dancer in a community hall, not as I thought some final falling into the self.

I really felt like I was reading Fanny Howe’s selected poems. I really felt a series of cross sections were working for me, beyond the stark beauty and rigor of the language I sensed tangled moments of emotion, of which the action in the world was hinged on consciousness of action bisecting the realms of politics, poetics, aesthetics in ethics, the realm of domestic humour, the giant clobbery feet of memory against the woven strands of landscape, birds.

I think there is something to be said when a writer takes the things which most conflict and converse within them, and reactivate the intersection of these experiences; sensing always an action that is yet to be layered in time.

Kindness and exuberance

It was a while back that I saw Josie Long perform at BATS Theatre in the NZ comedy festival – a friend of mine had recommended I see her show after meeting her in Auckland. Comedians always fill my imagination in a special way – for me comedians are often great chameleons, constantly poised at the edge of transformation, hovering just long enough for perception of one form to materialize then bury itself in the lungs of the audience again, kicking up swirls of muddy laughter or painful crystals of hilarity that keep the jaw primed – Josie’s set had some great narrative elements to it, I recall a parable-like quality to the show that seemed to build on certain narrative splinters that veered off into wonderful groves lit by a misguided group of animals caught between leisure poses and attempts at pictorial correctness. Her website is a great place to start if you feel like more info or catching one of her gigs: Josie Long…

Short short fiction

I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of Tom Cho’s collection of short short fiction – Look Who’s Morphing. I had a read of the first story in the collection ‘Dirty Dancing’ which was like eating a really really good piece of fruit, and you just can’t get over how good it is for ages. Here’s a link to the book on the Giramondo site – or you can check out his blog: Tom Cho. Like the pink pop blood of the cover too.

FashiON

Style Bubble – already enjoying this blog for its personal touch and fashion snaps – both professionAL and AMateur…

Sarah Gruiters website shows off some of her great accessORies…gill neclaces, I can so picture it.

Sophia Kokosaliki sort of designs for a life that could be lived elEGently underwater as well as on land…

Spring 09

New bit Like bit

A bit of something or somethings that have excited me recently:

1) Finding out about artist Jill Magid who aims to bring things that are far away closer to her body, and who says, ‘when in love I separate a someone from the everyone.’

2) Checking out the website blog Book By Its Cover which has loads of great book-art and book-design stuff.

3) This image:

Tooting Bec Lido in south London. Photograph By: Open House

The Tooting Bec Lido in south London, which ‘is the largest pool in the UK at 91.44 metres long and 30.18 wide. Dating back to 1906, it was a built by unemployed people living in the area. The pool is open to the public from May to September; the rest of the year you can only swim if you are a member of the South London Swimming Club, which has managed the lido during the winter months since the 1990s.’

All Well Afloat back online

Today is as good a day as any to launch some fresh posts. It is late 2009 but not too late.

New writing

If you would like to read the short prose story ‘A living spring’ it is here on the Blackmail Press site in their shiny new online Rebel Issue. I have a poem called ‘Embarking on her other names’ coming out in the Brief 38 journal so keep your eyes peeled if this appeals. In old news, head to the Turbine 08 page for a story called ‘Evolving’.

Also if you’re interested in art writing you can find my brand new prose review for the current exhibition Role dot Play featuring Vivian Lynn, Erica Sklenars, and Justine Walker, at Enjoy Public Art Gallery. Search the Enjoy archives for more writing, including the exhibition T & G Building and an interview with Eve Armstrong.

Newer writing

I’m finishing up a collection of writing I began in 2008. Whether the writing is prose or poetry is not so important right now – I’m focused on creating sharply focused dramatic situations through character, narrative, and tight-rope adventures in language (that is, I am exploring territory that someone described to me as ‘language as texture and language as meaning’).

I hope to post some observations and some writing as I go.

Thanks for joining this All Well Afloat caravan, pausing at watering holes, and wearing sunscreen.

Rachel.

Dear temperamental adjective

ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin temperamentum ‘correct mixture,’ from temperare ‘mingle.’ In early use the word was synonymous with the noun temper.

What makes writing temperamental – the correct mixture or have the right kind of social or linguistic skills that allow it to effectively mingle and communicate?

I like the ring this question has with this quote that introduces Louis Zukofsky’s Little, ‘Where coincidences intend no harm’.

I have been reading Alan Brunton’s collection fq, which is at times lucidly evocative, ‘imagining brothers and sisters, material worlds inside,’ and is host to a cast of characters and a vague sense of plot, plotting with and against them, through 132 poems.

There is also a range of formal arrangements, with some of my favorite stanzas dripping down the page, offering a kind of unconscious leak to spring up, or a slow thought to be stretched and vanish.

It is ugly but temperamentally so, there is a sense of ‘correct mixture’ passing through a host of minds, jammed into conversations, hunted and distracted.

Richard Powers suggests that ‘what’s seen (through the looker/character) reflects the lookers inner values,’ – this is a good principle. It also needs to extend to how its limitations could easily iron out the way characters, like writers too perhaps, absorb and dismiss their own principles, when they lead themselves by questions of value and perception – not entirely located in their body proper, but tangential, temperamental, seeing by mixing and going missing.

Alan Brunton goes missing a lot, his voice gets mixed up with his characters, his characters get mixed up in the plot, the plot gets mixed up in formal drips and avalanches, the landscape is full of obstacles and light.

I’m trying to write by incorporating ‘mixture’, a sort of atmospheric temperament through the language that persists or insists on sinking piles through thought, opening and closing the latches on life. It is a dance between the general inner value and the particular coincidences perhaps that linger there, and a bit of the reverse:

This is an example of general, well meaning, fumbling of the particular:

“What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself and adjective meaning ‘places on top,’ ‘added,’ ‘appended,’ ‘imported,’ foreign.’ Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.”

- Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red

A living spring introduction

The lyric poem component is a reworking of the earlier poem Possessed and takes certain echo’s from the monologue story that accompanies it. I wonder if it will be necessary in the end to keep the titles of the lyric monologue pairs the same, or if the echo’s will be able to stand on their own. I have much more work to do before making that decision!

The possibility of a prolonged monologue still interests me – and increasingly it will depend on experiments I make with structure and what I can roll with in the surprises the writing presents.

Food for thought. Which reminds me, it’s time for lunch.

A living spring

We’re going to take your elbows – they’re to go on without you.

*

I’d thought what it held was water, that the spring was like a fountain in a town square or hidden in the dent of a rock, or cast out of the earth by restless pressure.

It turns out that the spring has nothing to do with water. It has nothing to do with a town square with a dry flaky pavement, or the snuff of a cave, or even the inside
of a dark place being squeezed from its tube.

The spring is warmer outside than inside. It is out-living. It dances around matter
and what I thought a moment ago and what I think now can be possessed – can be struggled out of.

*

I watch my elbows with difficulty; chart the undergrowth of everyday tasks, familiar gestures that have become so assured. Time makes the body assured.
There are other factors I’m sure.

In the body is a muscle-listener, tenderness, a tongue tinned, quiet with lowly oxygen.
In this observance bells are cast. Pores ring. Temperature is right. Favourable conditions melt to music.

Life, without bells or hands to warm them, is lost in thought, or hope – anywhere close.
I will fold my skin. I will shake it out, and dance and dance. I will let go
and only tell the story at my feet.

*

And the goose bumps of my skin will withdraw from significance. I won’t be hidden, I wont be awake. I will only listen, outwardly. I’ll tell you eventually that it wasn’t my elbows you wanted, but something I never knew I possessed.

A living spring

M-L feels biased when her friends arrive with such blank faces. She hears footsteps on the tiles outside her door and already she can tell that these footsteps are expecting something from her.

The sound they make is rapid, even though it is summer and there is no real reason to be rushing toward the doorbell. The footsteps want to be seated, inside, where M-L will entertain them with her fine nose, and her partner B will prepare cooking smells that will go home with them in their dresses, ties and cardigans.

M-L has a concealed forehead. Her streaked hair is bracken that forms a blind spot where other people might just frown. You can see the faint undergrowth of her scalp through the sticks of hair. She has a mouth that says modest things that are pitched by her voice so that they glint a little like new coins. Her nose is delicate, with freckles that look like abandoned loose change. As her most endearing feature she secures and maintains her friendships with her nose and its active curves.

On a Tuesday, which is today, near the start of summer, M-L opens her door five times to let her friends in. She emailed 8 invitations, and she is a little pleased that she only has to open the door five times, rather than 8 times. B has a spinach parcel in the oven already. She calls it a parcel because she likes the thought of putting a gift in the oven and getting an even crispier, extra golden gift back.

Really its proper name is Spanakopita, which translates as Spinach Pie, and it is a recipe that B picked up off an ex-partner who was also a chef. M-L told me once in confidence that if not in the company of others, B and her find it overly easy to fight about Spanikopita and its origins. Thought M-L finds Spanakopita delicious she will only eat it when she is secure and confident in the company of her friends. Spinach Pie is a special treat for both B and M-L for very different reasons.

At about 8pm the friends take their seats at the long table in a room separate from the kitchen. At the table B has already placed her chin into the intimate bracken of M-L’s hair in a way that takes for granted the familiar smell she finds there; she no longer makes a lingering request. It is the place where B goes to centre herself in the company of M-L’s friends. M-L’s voice squeaks a little more than usual, as if she is experiencing a rush of goose bumps and is trying to hide them. Her friends pay particular attention to her nose, and I can see that it is a rock that they are all trying to stand on.

M-L toys with her blind spot. She has developed habits that her friends have come to rely on and being a rock is one of them. Her nose is a small island on which the people she loves congregate. They can throw stones off into the outer zones of her features and see them ripple, amused and almost hoping that the pebbles will some how bounce back and smack them lightly on their foreheads, an intimate ellipse like baptism.

This never happens, and they are all relieved and made awkward by disappointment.

I am attracted to M-L’s right elbow, and in the past this has been a problem in our friendship. I do not take much interest in her nose, and do not get much satisfaction from watching B hide a little in the thicket of M-L’s hair above the assembly of her friends. I rarely join the congregation in the middle of her face and in spite of myself start to ask B about where she found the delicious recipe for Spanakopita.

I do this even though I can see the party on M-L’s nose squirm and pick up wine glasses and take sips at great speed without comfortable breath in between and grip the glasses with both hands like bulky stones that can’t be thrown.

I resort to buttering the bread on my plate. I ask M-L how the life drawing class is going, all the while buttering the bread that flattens under the knife and is sucked down and breaks open and shows the flat-bone plate.

M-L uses sentences that have been practiced on others at different times earlier in the day, and she adds warmth to the details that bring her drawing class to life by making the words travel the full length of her tongue; the story pumps with quiet stamina.

I excuse myself from the table and go to the bathroom. B follows me and asks me if I’m all right, and I say that I have perhaps enjoyed too much rich food. The greasy marks on my wine glass are there when I get back.

The friends have left the safety of the island and are in different places of the flat, talking or stroking an object or helping tidy up the kitchen now that the plates have been cleared and dessert needs to come out. B begins to talk about the origins of her name, and the origins are admirable and have a deep root to them, and slink under the growth of time to a point made intelligible by darkness.

M-L leans over my shoulder, beside me but a little behind with her elbow almost touching my back. She wants to know what my name means. I tell her ‘a living spring’ and she says she never thought that a spring that is coiled and metallic and that hovers between the earth and the sky could be living. I do not say nor had I, but nudge the bend of her arm onto the launch of my back.

Under energy saving light bulbs, B gifts us Sorbet.

Lydia Davis and tangents of structure

Initially when I read Lydia Davis collection ‘Break it down’ I was attracted to the psychological environments she established through very minimal means and how this freed up an approach to the endings of the stories.

Since reading the interview Structure is Structure that Rina passed on to me the other day I have also become interested in thinking about how the structure of her stories informs my reading of her work as minimal and less invested in causality or its drama.

Structure is a kind of dry word, as if it means to take the magic out of something. In the context of her writing however it takes on a kind of unpredictable power.

It has something to do with scale and proportion, which in her stories seems to focus the psychological boundaries of her characters. There is an investigation of what her characters can know about themselves and their environment and how this informs what they can know of others.

For example in Five Signs of Disturbance, the physical limits of a woman’s state of mind are animated. A democracy between her thoughts and her environment exists. In this situation time is left alone. Later it transpires that it was there, and makes demands only when the character attempts to pin her understanding or confusion on something tangible or immediate. The structure becomes less about repetition or sparseness or lack of dramatic plot, but more about tensions leading to and away from understanding, and how it does or doesn’t find appropriate tangibility in language.

I get excited about the tangents in tangibility, that maybe understanding requires considerable tangents on which to hinge and generate a memory, or a memorable after-life once it is reabsorbed by the pace of life or the mind.

I will leave it at that for now. I am thinking about structure as I am thinking about how it can be experimented with in different ways in long or short fiction and how structure might relate to the logic of conclusion, or scale which is about tangents of boundaries.

Lydia Davis interviewed by Jason McBride can be found on the Poetry Foundation website and is titled Structure is Structure.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/feature.html?id=181391

Questions: Different padding to diffident pudding

I’m intentionally back to ignoring genre’s again – still with the chaos of specific ones in the back of my mind – the dramatic monologue, lyric, magic realism, language poetry, phenomenology…then the ones that seem to have been obscured for a while or the ones that you can feel coming at you as if from the future…etc

So more specifically I’m intentionally ignoring what can and can’t supposedly mix as genres or be subtracted or added. The writing generates a cacophony all of its own, and then my intentions do also, and then whatever else is out there nosing around.

Thinking about genres does seem like unnecessary trouble and for this reason my curiosity is piqued, I can’t help myself – why am I thinking about magic realism?

There is what you write and what you love to read. What you love to talk about also.

Conversation.

Where does magic realism fit in the conversations I’m having – strangely it might be an editing thing, a question of editing – which is one way of saying the shape you try and draw out of writing after it has led you where it wants you to go – or during the process if the writing is being demanding – or not at all if it’s being improvisationally lucid.

I think even the magic realists wouldn’t have liked the idea of magic realism much, the cute side of it anyway – whatever the name there does seem to be something about a relation of fantasy to talking about the present, maybe even the subjective generalised or the general subjectified to talk about the social.

E. Jabes has his characters variously put each other through questioning, or put each other on trial.

Strangeness and questions are related.

So if I ignore the trope magic realism and pick up on the following maybe it will get me somewhere more interesting, a place to have a conversation beyond petty rejection of terminology:

Editing
Fantasy
Subjective
Strangeness
QUESTIONS

A piece of writing may suppress its questions until the end of the first draft – this means it is also delaying a transparency of its potential strangeness, which by extension gives it a social and subjective framework.

It can’t always see at first what its fantasies are and how it needs to be edited or layered by intentionality, a layer which whether subjective or general allows specific questions to become visible to a reader.

When people begin to establish boundaries between each other, there is a necessary openness, a starting point with only implied boundaries, where few have been mutually exercised or practiced – humble, shy, anticipating but not yet lived.

Writing must also find a way to make liveable the implied boundaries it has set itself – and perhaps this is why I’m thinking about where editing fits into the process as well as fantasy and realism.

First lets talk about fantasy. Sport has been on my mind, on the mind of my writing…

Yes that’s right, sport, as in games, play – the national obsession is just the tip of the iceberg my writing is saying to me.

Then most recently the strangest proposition was made – Sport relates to Holidays!

What? The part of my writing that tries to clarify things for me has been a pain in the ass about this for weeks now…What does sport have to do with holidays? I’ve tried to ask it, cajole an answer from it. As always it took me a while to realize I needed to ask it some harder questions.

Does sport relate to pleasure?
Does leisure first confront the body?
What is the role of play in the imagination?
What do freedom and boundaries have to do with strangeness and how we confront it?
What explosions and superstitions can the athletic heart bear?

I’ve been working on a poem that has this line in it:

- proportion is an unfathomable holiday in another heart.

Holidays, like sport, occur on a scale of formal and informal play. Holidays are available to (inflicted on), in various forms, everyone – that is what is implied by the holiday. Sport has a similar proposition to it, an element of the life-miniature:

To explain:

- with watching a game of sport, playing soccer in the driveway or going camping or sleeping in the back-yard, we have the chance to respond to the subtle changes, twists and turns, that are otherwise obscured by everyday volatility. For better or worse.

Lets extend this further:

Another example would be how you don’t notice how family members, that you might grow up living with, age, in comparison to those relatives who you don’t see as often.

Sport or a holiday would seem to give you the opportunity to take in changes which time would normally smooth over, incrementally, as you slow down also, take time out, enjoy time for the pure pleasure of it, knowing that there is a start and end to the activity.

BUT it gets more interesting when you remember the element of play, pleasure in activity, in boundaries and inventive freedom. You would much rather prioritise the ‘general’ observation, the deepening of emotional, physical, mental and even spiritual involvement, seemingly at a remove from life’s usual pace and parameters.

At first this appears to be an attempt to just stall the increments that are always so swiftly passing in the everyday rush of routine.

What’s more significant is that we also try to do away with or reorient the superstitions of this rushing, this striving and straining – on holiday or at play, rushing, striving and straining are all present, they are just reorganised to suit a particular replenishment of the compass.

I think this is why I wanted to give a little wave to genre, to its historical and social compass – tapping into genres is a little bit like taking an unfathomable holiday in another heart.

It can be both ethical and unknown, limiting and explosive.

Different padding to diffident pudding…

Postscript to ‘Possessed’

I began ‘Possessed’ after watching the video performance by Hannah Wilke. Wilke was one of my early influences when I first began to practice performance and push the capacity for the body to exert its expertise in both art and writing.

I think realizing the body in anything is hard – even in life its hard. You could say the body is everywhere and it is explosive and secretive and arduous and lightening-like and a compass and a short straw and a superstition and a belief and a holiday and a home.

I’m going to try and get at the body a bit more – this attempt will try to enrich the ‘energy’ I’ve talked about in relation to my writing, that I’ve been attempting to shape through structures like the pairs of lyric monologues.

The body is tied to strangeness – a hiccup that devours its promise.

I want to know how writing might be able to endure the body and how the body might be able to better endure writing.

Possessed

We’re going to take your hands, they’re to go on without you – I watch my hands intently for the rest of the day.

I watch them perform everyday tasks, the familiar gestures that have become so assured.

Time makes the body assured. There are other factors I’m sure. In the body is a good listener.

Bells are cast. Pores ring. The temperature is right. Favourable conditions lead to music.

I consider a life without bells or hands to warm them. Palms
up – I weigh the soft sides on my cheeks.

Lost in thought, or hope, this is where I would choose to loose anything that belonged to me – anywhere close.

Who can best fold my skin? Who can shake it out, and dance and dance? I would undo silence but not the holiday.

I will let go and only tell the story at my feet. I’ll feel the goose- bumps of my skin withdraw from significance.

I will not be hidden, I will not be awake. I will have my ears glued to you, because you know me. Listen outwardly.

I will tell you eventually it wasn’t my hands, but something I never knew I possessed.

.—.
Notes:

http://www.ubu.com/film/wilke_gestures.html

Hannah Wilke (1940-1993)
Gestures (1974)

‘Gestures is a series of performance-based works in which Wilke faces the camera in extreme close-up and performs repetitive or durational physical actions. At times she kneads and pulls her skin as if it were sculptural material. Often her gestures – rubbing her hands over her face, smiling so hard that she appears to be grimacing, sticking out her tongue – take on a loaded significance when seen in the context of gender performance.’

The life in strangeness – Drip of sleep

My friends Paula and Marnie are editing a new publication called Public Good, and some of the things we’ve talked about including public-ness in art/writing/thought and that shadowy hyperactive and under-active word ‘good’ have led me to think more about recent experiments or ‘explosive sneezes’ in my writing.

I’d been flicking through this book that had been published in English in 1991, written by Julia Kristeva – the title was ‘Strangers to ourselves’.

I found this passage:

“The distinction set forth in the Declaration (of Independence) between “humanity” (whether it is ‘natural’ or symbolic’ is a moot point) and “citizenry” maintains the requirement of a human, tran-historical dignity, whose content never the less needs to be made more complex, beyond the 18th Cent optimistic naivety…

So dignity, what it could be or be capable of, is composed of differences prioritised in the realms of ‘humanity’ and ‘citizenry’. What a great place to start to think about strangers or strangeness and its many forms…especially at the moment when I’m responding to news in many guises in my writing – a list that includes; inflation, a Christmas tree on an army base, petrol, superstition, Zimbabwe, sport, narcissism and holidays.

But before I talk more about Kristeva, here is something from Eliot Weinberger’s essay, Karmic Traces that’s going to help me flesh these twists of intention and dalliance out:

“Vasana, which literally means ’scent’, is karmic residue, the stuff-as ineffable as smell-that remains from a past life. Each life produces vasanas, which remain dormant until one is reincarnated in the same species. That is, the vasanas from your life as a cat will only be triggered when, a thousand incarnations later, you are a cat again.”

When writing to Paula about these traces I started to relate them to pursuits of the public and the good. Without much methodical thought I drew these conclusions:

- there is a common pursuit of ‘good’ and a huge population of traces of it
- ‘good’ resides in the variety of traces that we experience in various forms of sociability such as politics, ethics, arts and the sciences etc

We have ‘good’ principals that can be accessed (enlivened is a better word) through traces specific to certain fields or professions.

We first aim for ‘good’ without having preconceived ideas about how it might be realized, and in which field or profession the trace will reveal itself, and from where it will give us a decent whiff of the ‘good’ stuff.

The real potential lies in the fact that a pursuit of the ‘good’ could make us appear in any number of fields, from politics to physics – how we re-familiarize ourselves with traces of ‘good’ sharpens the context of the field in which the pursuit has led us.

Does this mean that by sharpening the trace we sharpen the good and the social?

This seems an interesting expansion of how we would usually consider politics or the public in relation to the ‘good’ – public doesn’t lead to ‘good’ rather (or also) the pursuit of ‘good’ traces leads us to an unpredictable area of the public domain in which we can get to work to sharpen these ‘traces’ and explode them or sneeze at them or care for them depending on the dignity at stake.

The capacity of good and its public manifestations explode sometimes, expand in pleasant and unpleasant ways, but open new doors in which we decide the balance that is liveable….

Kristeva talks about these moments of the liveable and unliveable in terms of understanding strangeness and its many explosions:

‘Individual particularistic tendencies, the desire to set oneself up as a private value, the attack against the other, identification with or rejection of the group are inherent in human dignity, if one acknowledges that such a dignity includes strangeness. That being the case, as social as that strangeness might be, it can be modulated – with the possibility of achieving a polytopic and supple society, neither locked in to the nation or its religion, nor anarchically exposed/apposed to all of its explosions.’

I’ve posted a poem that I think relates very little to all but an exploration of strangeness – I think strangeness is enlivening when situated with a conception of ‘public’ and ‘good’ – which are at the heart of a lot of writing that I’m interested in reading. The poem is called ‘Drip of sleep’.

Drip of sleep

You see

we nap in preparation as others have done before us, a
legacy of prone company.

You see

there are drips we face that wear us down, disheveling our
prior lunches.

You see

there are others in motion, already lying down – drips that
course through old snacks.

You see

the lost hay of human slumber spikes us, and we pass out
sharp under a falling-needle.

The none too nonchalant art of problem solving

Collection connection

Though perhaps a little premature, I’ve been giving thought to the title of the collection; this seemed like an excellent way to moderate feelings of guilt while being away from my computer in Auckland this past week.

Before leaving I finally gained some ground on key aspects of the collections structure. While not quite in the league of hiring scaffolding and concrete mixers, these structural or formal elements are allowing me a greater momentum and intimacy, both in generating the writing and with how the reader might navigate the collection as a whole.

Energy

Giving consideration to comments from my first workshop critique I realised that I needed to find ways for the collection to do the following:

Energy in writing relies on capturing the momentum of its creation. A phenomenological balance between meaning being realised, physicality being exerted, and failure and hope generating idiosyncratic intensities are all essential to realising varieties of energy.

Without the right structure these explorations can leave a reader feeling unsatisfied with the undulations of meaning/non-meaning and by extension confidence in the writing’s voice can waver for a reader, when confronted with abstraction and incoherence. It became clear that I needed to find strategies that would allow me to house these undulations while encouraging confidence in the writing, and for a reader, across the collection.

Though these seemed like two separate issues to start with, it was helpful to consider how the individual works might be housed in a collection format. Considering works in this way allows for a greater flexibility in approach to how I might start problem solving the above. Tina summed up general comments after the workshop nicely when she said it could be as simple as finding a way to encourage the reader to go back to the poems for a second or third reading, as the slow-release of meaning/experience becomes digestible.

I started to address this by thinking about ways I could establish a relationship between the poetry and prose I’d been writing. Feedback on the prose had been positive with regards to transparency of intention and confidence of voice through irony, drama and other romantic gestures.

Dramatic Monologue

I also realised the Dramatic Monologue (DM) would be integral to finding a solution. When I did the reading workshop on the DM I began to consider the specific ways it is performative.

In a performance or reading the distinction between what is poetry or prose becomes secondary to the voice of the reader and how they choose to shape the characters, narrative, pace and momentum for a live audience. Voice selects what to emphasise over and above what the form on the page might dictate. The DM will be integral to how I will house and push the performative in the writing I’m doing.

This is not just because the DM emphasises the dramatic, rather I’m interested in how the DM activates the ‘you’ and the challenge and potential there is for me to contemporise the DM form, specifically through short works of prose rather than poetry. This will be a way to explore the ‘dramatic’ form more thoroughly.

You

Firstly lets look at the activation of the ‘you’ in a DM. We are probably most familiar with the ‘you’ in confessional poetry, often disembodied and at the mercy of the dominant ‘I’ who speaks in the poem. In the DM the ‘I’ still appears to dominate, however it is premised on an active interlocutor whose presence qualifies the ‘I’ to speak. Thus DM demonstrates a conditioned plurality.

The ‘you’ can be another listener in the poem, the reader and even the writer or another person overtly collaborating in the poems evolution.

The second point is something that I’m only beginning to experiment with and it rests on an intuition and observations I’ve made in the past about performance and audience.

Performative prose

Robert Browning’s characters are extremely controlling and proceed dictatorially (often delightfully so) through metre, line breaks, stanza length and shape etc. While I like this, I think it would prove disruptive for a contemporary reader to be confronted with this kind of formal didacticism.

This is another way of saying the enjoyment for a reader of finding a character dig himself deeper into a hole, or offering an idiosyncratic philosophical insight, can be enhanced also by freedom generated though a fresh form. A reader today requires a new kind of formal novelty against which to explore its freedoms and limitations.

(This will be interesting to come back to in a few months as a way to look at how my intention to track idiosyncratic and historical time develops.)

Housing the DM qualities and pushing them via prose is a viable way to extend the voices in the poems and the variety of performative qualities they exhibit on the page. Hopefully I can maintain the ‘energy’ of the writing while being both indirect and excessively direct at times about how this energy is installed.

In other words I’m finding ways to balance reader response, develop avenues for companionship in the collection and house a momentum that is enriched by but not limited to plot, theme or narrative.

Lyric Monologues

By titling a poem and prose piece with the same heading, I establish a portal through which the reader enters with an expectation of connection. Questions immediately jostle for attention also – what and how will the lyric connect with the companionable monologue? While the pieces don’t explain each other thematically, my aim is, via repetition and establishing this initial rhetoric, to prime the reader to look for connections extensively across the collection as well as discretely in individual works.

This will be an attempt to translate various echo’s in one piece into the language of other pieces. It will be one way to establish a to and fro, a deeper level/prolonged ghosting/ idiomatic conversation or historicising throughout the collection.

I had initially thought I would literally work towards one prolonged comic monologue, and I think I still will. The difference will be that this singular epic will be present mostly as an undercurrent, undulating and being undulated by the writing. Who knows though really? I may just have found a way to actually make my initial interest a reality.

At the moment I’m also experimenting with a long-story/poem format in which different monologues populate a transparent plot driven/narrative situation. So this is what will occupy me most over the break in conjunction with polishing and expanding the lyric monologue pairs I’ve been working on

- I love the idea of strangers in my monologues

- I think the inner hoot of owls is at the heart of the undercurrent

Her will and testament

Is my shadow a citizen or a

man?

Not a question your father would have asked.

Not the high-strung impostor natural as rubber.

Not the scar of the man.

Not to look too shrewd in his wake.

Not ground, terribly versatile.

Not the other portal of weightlessness.

Not without a deadline always taking care.

Not one full-blooded vote.

Not the festive tree glinting on the army base.

Not the strangers in his monologues.

Not the location outskirts cut with grass.

Not the people they say were training to handle lights.

Not the warbling aridity.

Not hopeless for love yet to happen.

Not the living they do between volumes of tufts.

Not the nutrition they smell and burn.

Not dew.

Not provenance.

Not the passing through that shod him.

Not inherited gait.

Not unlike mischief.

Not its inner talent-quest.

Not our marriage.

Not one kiss.

Not mine or his.

No, bury me next to Cynthia, her shadow had dignity.

Wedding cake

You do

make out life’s smorgasbord
of hot and cold dishes
on the horizon –
salivate, it’d be rude not to.

You do

see a uniform table
that splays bright orange felt
east to west, a water jug
that weeps brambles.

You do

introduce yourself to the
wedding party, you express
hereditary borrowed at
the last minute.

You do

attract by sheer
gravitation; your spontaneous
semisweet stockings
prove personable.

You do

forget the names of people
you grew up with, you loyally
remember the memorable
strangers.

You do

wrap up a slice of cake
for the road, you cradle its
moist echo-action
of the journey home.

Wedding cake

You like weddings?

Yes, I think I understand. You’re saying that you enjoy them from a distance, just like we’re experiencing that one up there on the hill from down here. It’s like looking out of an airplane window – black spots of happiness scurrying this way and that. What a long time it has been.

Ever been married yourself? I was married, twice. Oh, no, not at all, I was married twice but to the same person. It would have looked like quite a standard sort of arrangement from the outside, as most do. Being on the inside was not quite the same. I have to admit that I do miss it. I imagine you know what I’m talking about, being a keen observer yourself.

I’m glad you stopped to chat. I bet you’re quite familiar with the inside, how the inside leads a life of its own. Sometimes it feels as though there are insides within insides. It isn’t me who contains the inside but it’s the inside that snaps me in! There were those good times.

I didn’t mean to keep you from your business – it is beautiful here on the beach; I forget sometimes that people have other things to do. Unlike me, not everyone is free to loiter out the day. What do you do, if you don’t mind me asking? I get the feeling I should already know. Of course, I’ve seen your campaign posters. Are you also involved with dogs? You’re in charge of four mutts as far as I can see.

They’re boisterous aren’t they! You must go through a stack of dog food. Big eaters can place quite a stress on the budget I’ve found – it was one of the contributing factors of my last divorce. Well I suppose you could see it like that, often it is an imbalance of desire that is at the root of the problem.

It’s been such a long time since I’ve eaten a proper wedding cake; I think I’ve forgotten what it tastes like.

Look, do you have a minute? I really think it’s important that I go up there. It’s really quite imperative to tell you the truth. I know what I have to do now. I’d only need you for half an hour, just to help me up the hill really. You could tie the dogs up on my porch – my house is just over there, up from that boat shed. What do you say? The party looks large enough; they’ll just think we’re late additions. People are too polite in those situations to ask questions. There’s really some urgency in me to get up there. It’s the only thing on hand that I can take part in anonymously – I must go to that wedding.

I know you understand – I remember a rally you did, now that I think about it, with that environmental focus. I could see by the way you whisked up the crowd that you weren’t one of those types who just pay lip service to community involvement – you really seemed to stand behind your words! I’m not afraid to tell you where my vote will lie in the next bi-election.

Yes, I promise, the dogs will be absolutely fine.

Air and the human heart

I’ve been reading an interview online called ‘The Complexity of the Human Heart’, a conversation between poet Marie Howe and David Elliott. You can find it here:

http://www.bu.edu/agni/interviews/online/2004/howe-elliott.html

Howe’s position as a poet is both experimental and personal.

After my workshop last week I’ve been thinking about how I want to both experiment with levels of meaning and emotion in the work, and further make transparent or intensify the moment of reading, the process that the reader goes through when navigating the poem.

I want to evoke the sensation for the person reading the work that they are discovering the poem, as I discovered it and also in ways that haven’t happened yet. In this sense the poem does not resolve an issue but allows for the issues motion and commotion to transpire in it. The tone of my work can often feel ‘burdened’ for a reader and often the first instinct can be that something important in the poem is not being discovered.

It’s a challenge for me to find ways in which I can facilitate a situation in which someone reading my work can be comfortable pulling out what meaning they can, as well as a sense that the logic of the poem, say its repetitions, synonyms, echo’s, beats or rhythms, have been realized as another part of the poems over-all message and the commotion that disturbs the message.

This essential tension inhabits longer fiction through narrative or character development, how a character grapples with their relationships and environment alongside their less accessible inner world. In a way I’m trying to realize the dynamics of transparency and inarticulateness that shape perception and experience. There are many poets engaged with this, and I’m trying to figure out how I want to approach it, what I want to prioritize  and of course build up the language I need to realize it – a kind of blind anticipation and subsequent training.

Howe puts it brilliantly when she says, ‘I also think it is my desire to have [the poems] be experiences that actually happen between the speaker and the hearer so that they happen in the air.’

This is an interesting way to picture a poem – the parts that you see/hear and the parts that are in the air – that is an exciting tension!

Howe also say’s that, ‘All too often we create a self we can live with [in poetry].’ This is something to think about as I position the livable and unlivable components of self, not in the be-all-and-end-all sense but those forms of self-consciousness that define our temporal and special being in the world.

This is all very serious sounding, so back to Howe again for a moment;

‘So I think maybe when we say confessional we mean a poet who writes about one thing, beats one drum, and we are supposed to feel something for that poet that’s different from what we feel for ourselves or other people.’

This is very intriguing to me, that the poet allows for a unique kind of relationship to exist in the world, that allows a sense of perspective or position that is alternative, while wholly accessible, or identifiable. This is the space of the imaginary and real in which these poles aren’t opposed, they just flux in the hope of a capacity for something to happen in the air of the encounter between writer and reader.

Howe;

‘Was it Hopkins who said, “A taste of self”? I guess I still believe in the soul even if I don’t believe in identity.’

For Howe, whatever you call this space – wild capacity, self-soul, air, it is the ability to explore a variety or complexity of the human heart in the poem that grounds the relationship or contract between writer and reader.

‘It’s the complexity of the human heart that I think is poetry’s subject–the complexity of the human experience. I think the best poets writing today represent that complexity in the broadest, deepest sense. So there are poets who tell personal stories but honour that complexity’.

Howe has written several collections of poetry, all quite different explorations of the hearts complexity. She has some great advice about writing’s coming into being:

‘Howe: I said I feel something has me in its mouth chewing me and there is nothing for me to do but be chewed, and Stanley said, “Yes, and you must wait to see who you’ll be when it’s done with you.” Because I wanted to write right away, and I couldn’t, and I had to wait to see who I was going to be after this experience sort of had me for a while. I feel that’s what’s happening now. I have to wait and keep writing, but wait to see what really wants to have a hold of me next and who I am and then to write the next real collection.’