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.

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.

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

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.’

Toril Moi and Michael Palmer: Writing aesthetic questions

Toril Moi gives a really articulate response to historical practices of feminist critique as well as current approaches to theory and practice in this area in her lecture ‘I am not a Woman Writer’, a 2007 Feminist Theory Lecture at the Tate Modern.

Here’s a link to the podcast of this excellent discussion:

http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/podcast/mp3/2007_11_20_toril_moi.mp3

Moi looks at the impact of these different imperatives (theory/practice) on a political as well as ethical position formative to the development of the contemporary writer.

There are many things I could talk to here, though I want to focus on the position she advocates – that its important to keep your options open as a writer, whether this means inhabiting at times a woman’s perspective or inhabiting one of many other perspectives that broaden the encounters, the scope of contact we have with an articulation of the human condition.

I want to talk a bit about aesthetics in relation to writing. I also want to look at the relevance of aesthetics to a political as well as ethical position for the writer to inhabit as they expand variously ways to speak the human condition.

The political and writing

Michael Palmer talked in his Master-class address at IIML on Friday about a number of approaches to a politics of writing, tracking a number of practices by authors and accompanying theoretical contexts. Like Moi says in her lecture, he also emphasised that, ‘theories depend on the questions you are raising’. I would also say that practice also depends on these questions.

In this post I want to explore where these questions are derived from and what the aim of this rhetorical imperative is as it concerns the writer.

Michael Palmer linked much of the writing he talked to, to a navigation of urgency and patience implied by a politically responsive practice/theory of writing. The political emerges in various encounters between people, events, disasters and dreams that make different demands on individuals – temporal, spacial, linguistic and inaudible etc.

Moi also reminds us that our responses to these demands are also contingent on our ethical positions, that sometimes a politics alone cannot withstand the demands of an event or encounter, in the broader context of human experience (of which the political is a significant part).

What is common here is that people both activate and witness life in political ways, they also do so morally and aesthetically.

I want to tease this out more

The French writer Mourice Blonchot thinks about the Disaster – he says that in a radical way we always respond to a disaster that hasn’t happened yet – the disaster exceeds us – it must also remain ahead in order to make us fully question our motives for following in its wake.

This is interesting but raises a number of political, moral and aesthetic questions.

Ethics and writing

If we relate the announcement of disaster yet to be, to the development of modernist and post-modernist shifts in aesthetics we see a link and a currency to how writing and ethics inform each other in the aesthetic moment.

We could say that we respond to an ‘event’ of aesthetics that hasn’t happened yet. We could say that this aesthetic elusiveness also allows us to question why we are following it. In a strange way the aesthetic maintains vulnerability, because it requires that we ask it hard questions. We are required to navigate it with all the resources we have, even though we don’t have a complete picture of it.

In this there is a little bit of leeway, a flurry of past/present/future orientated around openness, but one that has an evolving and perceivable shape that we must respond to and work within.

While this is interesting it is also of help to consider Toril’s position that ethics must be able to cope with theories that may exist in the world and practices that are yet to come or inhabit the everyday experience. This is an inversion of our usual expectations of theory and practice, of which she insists there is constant vacillation.

Aesthetics and writing

Moi ends her discussion by stating that writing provides a hope – a hope that comes from the writer saying, ‘This is what I see, do you see it too?’

In this sense there is an exchange between writer and reader, but there is only a shape still-in-the-making at the point of exchange, so you don’t know precisely what you are giving, or what you are getting.

You are grounded by that question ‘do you see it too?’ – and the shape of it, it’s aesthetic shape, through which you aim towards an exchange, and manage the various questions that demand active response, ethical and political.

In this sense the aesthetic continues to ask us why we are going to follow it in the way that we are, even though we don’t have a complete picture of it. It demands that we follow it in a way that allows us to bear with it morally and politically, that we be successfully companion to it.

What makes this ‘real’?

By the time I finished the first version of the ‘Mitchell’ exercise, I think I’d already begun to anticipate the inversions I was planning. I didn’t necessarily incorporate them, but I did clarify my images in anticipation of turning them upside down. This is why the first is stronger, it is clearer in its progress, and is not so burdened by ‘ending’ or of tying things up at the end. There are small endings throughout.

The second version is quite nonsensical. I’ve been thinking about what Tina wrote to me in response to the last paragraph in Leaving Home, how it works poetically, but is also very real. I read ‘Life: Field Research’ to my friend Susie via Skype and her response hinged on the image that I started with, of the hands. There was something in this that she carried with her throughout the poem and it was through this that she traced her path. I really liked the way she described this kind of progress, path finding and reconnaissance.

In a way this situating of an image prepares the reader to flick back to the beginning once they have finished the first reading, maybe even just lightly, to glance at this initial image and identify why it was there, whether it leads in the right direction, or if it’s altered slightly on second look.

I’m always drawn to surreal images and word play, because of the disregard for logic they prompt, though not even I believe this neutrality and it is the logic that emerges anyway or via the reader, that makes the process interesting for me. I’m becoming more interested in bracketing the surreal or heightened poetic. To explain it’s kind of like how James George installs humour in his characters dialog and lets loose with language in his descriptions of the characters environment infused with their consciousness of it. So that’s one way of looking at it.

Part of what I’m trying to clarify is this sense of completion for the poem if I’m doing a monologue or a dialog piece, in prose or poetry. When is it finished? At which point has it conveyed enough so that the reader can comfortably glance back to the start and get their bearings, test their instincts and impressions, and feel like they already know the poem enough to ask it or themselves questions.

The ‘Mitchell’ exercise allowed me to write without making too much of a distinction between me as writer and reader, I was leaving myself clues and cornerstones which I could pivot off and return to. Cool.

So I got stuck again

So I got stuck again and then was reading this in the IIML newsletter:

“One excellent metaphor per page is much much better than eight fairly good metaphors on a page. Watch out for adverbs, don’t use them too much. Don’t write a character according to your first thought about how the character should be, because that’s probably a cliché. Take the cliché and turn it round. A bank robber shouldn’t be tough, mean and scarred, they should be gay and Welsh. That’s a good fresh bank robber. Sam Goldwyn said, “What we need here are some brand new clichés!” Invent brand new clichés.”

- David Mitchell

Desperately trying to go cold-turkey from weekly exercises I coudn’t help myself and like a wimpering pathetic adict I made up my own:

Write a poem and then turn the images into opposites/alternatives.

So up next is the ‘exercise’, Versions 1 and 2.

p.s. that thing about limiting the metaphors, might not be so generative in poetry, a bad metaphor can work wonders…though it would be an interesting proposition to debate one day if we all get really bored or run out of biscuits – eek, what a thought!

Two books

I’ve just finished Hummingbird by James George, and before this Acts of Love by Susan Pearce.

Acts of Love had a tone generated by the way the characters are realized in the narrative. Pearce didn’t confuse the ideals of the characters with who they were. In one way this made the characters feel distant from me initially in the book, but it allowed a later freedom of movement for their own agendas to come to life, to visualize the attempts alongside the accidents that construct their journeys. Realizations came from a tension between intention and action, reflection and response.

Hummingbird’s quite different in tone, though, like Acts of Love, in which there was a uniqueness to the ‘dramatic’ (non-Gothic in feel somehow) progression of the story, it’s like walking into a cool room after having sat in the sun for too long – something alternative sinks in. George infused the dialog of his characters with humor and puns, however his descriptions and the inner lives of the characters were beautiful, rich and intense, shaped in the limits and evocations of his choice of language. For example, the image used to evoke the relationship of Jordan and Kataraina, a leaf with jagged edges, each a half of the leaf, unable to see each other from opposing edges, all of each other, but somehow bound into its whole by a spine.

I don’t know why I’m so interested in people occupied with design at the moment, but I’ve been a bit stuck with writing the last few days so I’m going to write a series of three poems along this line of interest; one loosely based on the coin designer of the first NZ decimal range of coins, My James Berry, the design of a suit featured on Stuff today which mimics the effects of old age and will give you a taste of what its like, and a mystery third…

To truth or not to truth

Watching American Idol intermittently as I write this I thought it might be a good opportunity to talk about some cool quotes by Jorge Semprún in Interview with Lila Azam Zanganef in The Paris Review, Spring 07, Is 180. His take on writing ‘truth’ via imagination in literature looks at how you can inhabit perspectives that aren’t your own, to generate a truth which is.

This seems relevant to notions of point of view I’ve been exploring in recent writing but also to things we’ve talked about in class around writing with characters or speakers that are from different backgrounds than the writer.

Semprún operated for many years before and after WW2 as a communist double agent in France and Spain. He was interred at the German labour camp, Buchenwald, towards the end of the war and it took him 20 years to reach the point where he could begin to write about his experiences. In the interview he talks a lot about being in the camp, though not being Jewish, and how he deals with writing of his experience, and how ‘truth’ might be communicated and achieved in literature.

“This is where literature begins: narration, artifice, art – what Primo Levi calls a ‘filtered trust’. And I believe ardently that real memory, not historic and documentary memory but living memory, will be perpetuated only through literature. Because literature alone is capable of reinventing and rejuvenating truth. It is an extraordinary weapon, and you’ll see that in ten or fifteen years, the reference material on the destruction of the Jews or Europe will include a collective of literary testimonies – our, possibly, but also those of younger generations, who have not witnessed but will be able to imagine.”

A memory that must reinvent and rejuvenate is something that’s key to communicating a human presence in poetry I think. What are the implications for writing what you’ve no experience of?

Semprún writes “You might object, and you would be right, that there is no need to actually experience a concentration camp in order to ascertain the existence of good and evil. You can ascertain in other ways of course, in the most banal portions of our everyday lives, but the camp, because it focuses all experience around the constant risk of death, renders visible what is ordinarily more faint – that a human being is free by definition, that he has the freedom to be good or evil in every circumstance.”

At the least there must be some connection, perhaps at the level of ‘human freedom’ as Semprún mentions. But is this enough? What if we come at it from the other way – that it’s difficult or impossible in some way to write about ones own experience, or a historical situation.

Further to this, the truth of the matter depends on what you are trying to communicate and how you think your reader will experience it. For Kafka the worlds of his books perpetuated their realities and the various forms of logic and communication in these realities. The world of the reader is the unreality. So in this respect reality takes imagination on the part of the writer and reader, and unreality of the writer or readers world doesn’t require imagination. This is quite a simple reduction of things but it serves to raise a point. That in our current situation we also need a bit of imagination in our world of unreality and less imagination maybe in any realities we create. Hmm, not sure about this but lets carry on.

Imagination is always going to be involved in an account, details are not enough in themselves, poems are not lists, or explications in the form of cause and effect. I think there is something in communication at all times, the moments of control and lack of control, that’s somehow key to human experience and that memory via the imagination can best communicate this in poetry. This is more valuable to writing than any kafka-esque pro or cons argument about imagination.

You can speak from somewhere you’ve not been, and in doing this the responsibility of your freedom in doing this still stands. You must find someway of acknowledging your limits of perspective, while challenging historicizing reductions of human experience.

It reminds me of the notion of home regarding the writer and reader, the environment from which each take up their role. Usually it implies a bracketing from ones life, at the same time as there must be a means for this bracketing to be feasible – one must feel at home when one reads or writes. This is something that came up when Kate Duignan talked us, and that line in one of her stories say’s it really well; ‘we see faces we never knew the adults possessed.’ The children were at home but experiencing it in a way that’s entirely new to them.

This leads me to the next thing I want to relate here; “The gaze of others will cause me…to appear” – that’s Semprún again. In relation to exceeding ourselves, while also maintaining a responsibility for where we come from, it seems there is a need to negotiate point of view. The quote above suggests bearing witness to a new point of view allows the initial view to appear. In the case of writing, inhabiting multiple perspectives, what is the course then? In a way it could be that the views that you create will look back on you, they will inevitably cause you, or the speakers view in the writing, to appear.

I want to experiment with this in upcoming writing – what makes it possible for us to exceed our expectations, our own limits and boundaries, but also be shaped by how these perspectives appear (in the world). This comes back to dignity, that dignity is appearing and being prepared to be seen by others – to appear motivated by individual freedom and a more common freedom, the common ground that underlies all human experience.

I will end with two things: One by Semprún and another of a discussion on music with my flatmate.

Semprún – “Later I found that when I referred to myself as you, as in The Long Voyage, I was able to convey more objective sense of my experience. I observed myself as my own double – not as the actor, but as the witness of my own life.”

Talking music – When we were all talking in class the other day about Christian Bok, I began thinking if his work as akin to a joke to the ear, that the joke was carried in the sound of the words, rather than narratively, perhaps through accidental meaning too. I was wondering if there was an equivalent in music so asked my flatmate who is a bassoonist. He spoke of a few composers who interpret existing composers work and draw out humour or absurdities. At the end of our talk we got to the lasting jokes of the human race and really at the end of the day nothing beats farts – in the words of my flattie ‘farts are funny from the day your born to the day you die’ – Amen. I’m sure this insight would have livened up the recent lecture on philosophic aesthetics, no end.

What does rapport have to do with aesthetic ejaculation?

I’m going to take the opportunity to talk about the FHSS Seminar given by Kendall L. Walton today and some thoughts on the writer/reader relationship.

Going on from the last comment I made about a voice in a poem being composed of a scale of imperatives, that shape the reality of the world the voice inhabits, I feel I need to do some thinking about interplay between fiction and non-fiction or autobiography in what I’m writing. This is important when considering where the voices will draw their worlds from. It is also important when considering how the reader will be able to recognize and participate in the worlds of the voices.

Thinking more about the dramatic monologue lately I think where I speak from is becoming more of a focus in the writing I’m doing. Obviously it is how this position manifests in the writing that is of interest here.

Wikipedia describes the dramatic monologue as:

‘A type of poem, developed during the Victorian period, in which a character in fiction or in history delivers a speech explaining his or her feelings, actions, or motives. The monologue is usually directed toward a silent audience, with the speaker’s words influenced by a critical situation.’

So the speaker’s words are influenced by a critical situation real or imagined. How does the writer inhabit the critical situation? How does the reader inhabit the critical situation?

About the FHSS Seminar given by Kendall L. Walton, ‘the world’s leading expert in philosophical aesthetics,’ today, I have to say I was disappointed. Not by his core philosophies but where he was directing them and where he chose to situate the limits of his work in relation to readers and poets, and musicians and listeners.

In his paper entitled “Poets, Personae, Thoughtwriters” he set out a comparison between ‘speech writers’ and poets to emphasize that once the poem inhabits the reader, the poem ditches the poet. Poets invariably arrange poems for use by readers – the poem first and foremost belongs to the world of the reader.

To explain, poems end up in the voice of the reader, a reading voice, a thought voice of the reader, however you want to put it. Poems can be spoken at a wedding, be recited internally, be memorized and they are realized in the context of the readers world. Thus once the poem inhabits the reader, the poem ditches the false position of the writer as key to the poems mobility (that’s how the poet is like a speech-writer in Kendall’s thinking. The poet prepares the poem for work in the voice of the reader).

In this way it is the reader who socialises with the speaker in the poem, the words used, and employs them in their everyday life. The reader can engage the poem in many ways by imagining they’re the speaker, refusing to empathise with the speaker, using the speakers words as a succinct exemplification of thoughts or feelings they have but can’t express etc.

Granted some of this is a bit suspect, but if you keep in mind that his aim is to emphasize the place of the reader, that poetry perhaps is centred on relationships across readers, rather than having the writer at the center then his aim is justifiably contemporary.

A key area of discussion in recent years in the visual arts in NZ has been around ‘relational practice’. One way to understand this is that relational just means an emphasis is placed on the viewer of the work of art as the key to activating the work. The artist then is on an equal plane as the viewer, the artist is there to facilitate participation in the artwork, and importantly the artist doesn’t know more than the view. The viewer has a bit more power in this respect. Unfortunately Kendall L. Walton didn’t relate his work to the recent approaches in the visual arts that articulate a participatory involvement of viewers and the arguments that have arisen around this.

Kendall mentioned another contemporary method of understanding a work of art, though did not outline his negative response to it in relation to his ideas of the reader. He stated that thinkers have moved from locating the meaning or true experience of the work of art from the intention of the creator to having the meaning/experience/mobility imbedded in the work itself. The work perpetuates an experience of it that doesn’t rely on the subjectivity of the author or reader.

To illustrate the problem I can identify in the limitations to an aesthetic navigation of poetry through the reader alone, that seemed present in his paper, I will tell you something about ‘ejaculation’.

And what place does ejaculation have in this I hear you ask. Well, writer and Anglican priest, George Herbert, (April 3, 1593 – March 1, 1633), related his verse to a process of ejaculation, which in the ecclesiastical sense, suggests that the believer is the conduit for the word of God. Ejaculations were pure inspirations, rather than representations of inspirations. In a nutshell it removed human involvement, specifically the writer, from the sophisticated inspired verse.

There are many interesting interpretations possible here, but back to Kendall. I thought there was some part of his argument that seemed to update the position of the writer-as-conduit of God to the more contemporary, reader-as-conduit of the poem.

What a weight of responsibility to put on the poor old reader! I mean I thought I was just reading a poem! I at least thought I’d be sharing the load with the writer! I realise God is dead and well the author died a little while ago too, but I thought that was just a way of weening ourselves off silly subjective reductions and veracious appetites for meaning – I thought we were broadening our appetite rather than slimming it down! I’m hungry for words but don’t leave me by myself, I need companionship, I need to feel like I’m in the company of others – God-dam all I’m asking for is a chance to socialise and be reminded that its out there for me at any time – even when I’m at home in my turtle PJ’s sipping a cup of muesli.

Well that’s my rant over, for now. Good on Anna Jackson for challenging his metaphor of the ‘speech writer’ in relation to the poet. I just wish Kendall had risen to the challenge and explicated his position more thoroughly in relation to broader fields of aesthetics.

Right, so the reason I bought this up was to talk about fiction and non-fiction in my writing. Basically I think me and the reader are in it together. Like any relationship (that may last or may necessarily be a fulfilling one-night-poetry-stand) you need to work at it and build up a rapport from the start. You need to establish certain limits and certain places where these limits, given the right context, can be exceeded or surprised.

The speaker of the poem can be imagined or be closer to my own voice and the reader or listener is capable of accepting either so long as they can verify what the speaker is doing there in the poem, and as importantly what they themselves are doing there in the poem. That’s what rapport is I guess.

Flaubert goes fusion

‘I believe that, between us, over the course of those days, was born a very particular kind of affection which is neither friendship nor love but something like a fusion of sensitivities!’

- Gustave Flaubert speaks of his friend Louis Bouilhet, The Paris Review, Spring 07, Is 180.

This phrasing is weird though somehow really evocative. I want to play with it and see to what extent I can relate it to the voices that inhabit a poem, potentially alongside the speaker’s voice. (Different voices that may even constitute a large part of the speaker’s position.)

‘Sensitivities’ could imply many things, though the phrase places emphasis on compassionate consideration that has arisen between the friends that exceeds conventional categorization.

thin-skinned pity
pity-skinned physical
physical-skinned pigment

Just needed to flex a bit of language there before asking this big question: Why not friendship or love?

First some biographical speculation. The excerpt is taken from a passage written by F that he placed in a sealed envelope following the death of his friend. This letter is newly reprinted in The Paris Review, its insides expounded, and another letter, this time a letter F wrote and sent to a second friend at the time of B’s death, is arranged alongside, providing us with a morbid yet fascinating axis of comparison regarding these two modes of memorialization.

You could say Flaubert wants distance from some obligation implied by love or friendship in this description, assumptions of certain limits the words Love and Friendship imply. While there is something almost cold about the ‘fusion of sensitivities’ Flaubert’s enthusiasm carries an excitability that can’t be explained by the intellectual detachment the assertion promotes.

It may simply underscore regard for B that Flaubert’s not found in any of his other relationships. Either way I like the idea that this affection relies on a specific convergence in time, at a particular place, and that there is no guarantee that it will repeat or endure. Still, to consider affection in this way, as something that must be started afresh each time the two meet is also disconcerting as much as it is oddly refreshing. It carries exhilaration for common ground discovered between two people at a particular time and place.

These multiple ways of valuing relationships is something I often write about. This includes the tension that arises through forms of acceptance and conflict. There is some play between anticipation and expectation. Through resistance we find out what we want and what we don’t want. Some preliminary argument seems to take place. We are at the threshold of anticipation and must find ways to proceed. In a way this is like walking a scale of imperatives.

I see the series of voices that are starting to emerge in my writing, as revealing a ‘fusion’ of various imperatives, this is kind of the life-force that drive the individual voices. A scale of imperatives play out along a scale of social interactions.

Laughing in the voice of the reader

I begin training – a keen spit-distance to monitor resistance and friendship in the external signs of vital companionship. To moisten the negotiations. To hoick as much as I can fit in my throat and somehow make it come out laughing in the voice of the reader.

How long will I be in your life for?

I want to think about the body of the reader and the poem.

Nin on D.H:

“the body had its own dreams”

“Lawrence was patient. He gave his characters time. They are to find their own way and hour of resurrection. It was very slow this gaining in confidence in the wisdom of the body. So Lawrence was patient, through a maze of timidities, retractions, blunders, awkwardness’s”

I relate to the durational progress of confidence in the intimacy one rekindles with ones own senses and bodily instincts in the everyday sense – and in specific ways in the act of writing – the translation of form into new suspicions of form.

I wonder at the relation of the individual’s moment of rediscovering the wisdom of the body – to lurch inside wisdom – to that of another individual’s – taking place somewhere else.

Is it necessary to communicate the lurch? How does this happen if you don’t understand it enough to put it into some form of language? Do you resist primarily the duration of the resurrection and rather you commit intimacy through habits of memorisation, transformation that is possibly imbedded in your own experience of time as much as anyone else’s.

These habits ultimately have recourse to their wild body of dreams – in this way habits are true and virtuous, because they exceed us without warning, change course, leave us standing alone with nothing but the resurrection of one’s body. Ultimately alive and well in the chemical reaction (tension/resistance) of the intimate relation – apart but reacting together.

This state of transformation is the habit-relationship.

However it is necessary to consider the reader relationship more specifically (especially if I want to establish a relation between the reader and his/her own voice, over and above my own or those of my characters. I need to consider the significance of duration in terms of intimacy and companionship with the reader and how this will be vitalised by the voices in the monologue.

Age and environment of protagonist – does it matter?

Nin on D.H. “It is an effort to recapture genuine evaluations, like those of children before they are taught. A child will say to an older person who has been playing with him and participating whole-heartedly in his make-believe: Are you older than me? How can that be?”

To resist at any age you wish. To become companions whenever it suits.

Hannah Arendt (Reflections on Literature and Culture) suggests Kafka’s protagonist’s super-human-ness resides in a consciousness without career other than resistance – a pure antagonism that generates a model behaviour or ‘good-will’ over and above the moral realism of the situation or context or environment or institution or ‘façade’ that the protagonist single-mindedly confronts.

The profession of resistance – rather than the habits of one professional reality requiring moral opposition from another to exist. This reminds me of how Arendt wrote about Aquinas ideas of good and evil and that evil is not the absence of good but self sufficient and mobilised by its own mechanisms. The binary does not illuminate the mechanisms of each in a singular way – the binary distorts agency whether for better or worse.

Resistance has a long romantic history.

I want to dwell on this a bit more to get at how I’m going to conduct my own romantic pursuits in this collection.

“Blueprints cannot be understood except by those who are willing and able vividly to imagine the intentions of the architect and the future appearances of the building.” (104 -5). Here Arendt suggests Kafka’s approach is more involved with imaginative consciousness rather than sensory experience.

“Kafka’s protagonists are not motivated by any kind of revolutionary ambitions; they are propelled only by their good will, which exposes the hidden structures of this world almost without knowing it, or wanting to.” 104

“Kafka’s stories…contain no elements of daydreaming and offer neither advice nor edification nor solace”

I think I can attempt to vitalise resistance while flaunting the romantic excess of subdued and uninhibited contradictions of ‘daydreaming, advice’ and ‘edification’ – this is hard to articulate, but if I get out of the habit of characters or voices concerned with whether romanticism is progressive or regressive – and enter at the heart, the spinal column, the nervous system – whatever and whichever means – in each case to ride Benjamin’s ‘wave’, resist and protest and continue to do so, to resurrect resistance, the body of it as it fails and succeeds, joy of birth on top of birth. I want the writing to come to an experience of resistance – rather than prioritise ‘distance’ or ‘lack’ or ‘phenomenological truth’ as exhibits of the experience vs. consciousness debate.

In logical terms:

Resistance is a key social tool – key to the purpose and hope of non-linearites – social action and vital companionship.

This is how resistance works – as a process that memorises the living action of something or someone whether they are alive or dead – always the purpose of exceeding the social contract of death – but the necessity of transcendence is thus discredited by ongoing resistance in this situation – as transcendence is mono-resistance – sapiens-resistant and so in this case falls down.

To trust in pure purpose, how romantic. I am a romantic, I require the bustle of time and the solitude of eternity. But this is where companionship comes in.

The world has changed. The world outside Kafka’s novels is now focused less on necessities as such but the speeding up of necessities – to put them in stride with our time-keeping, even ideally ahead of us, insisting true structural mechanisms are merely forms suspicious of other forms. What we are living with is the death of necessity in favour of acceleration of resistance over and above socially plausible timeliness and companionship.

So time is mobilised in new ways – but still with little hope of structural companionship.

I will be dealing with visualised habits of resistance exceeding us and coming up short at great speed. This is why light and sound and visualisations of the future will be so important to the writing – are already. The universe may be telling a good joke – and who are we to hurry it along? As Calvino said one should never ‘hurry myth’.

I initially said I wanted to look at how people imagine, neglect, seek out, and/or memorize the worlds or concerns of others. An individual can pursue true habitation of purpose in a world of others (go solo), and put more concisely an individual can pursue and assume the habits of a shared purpose vitalised by this collection of individual variety.

To share in the world consciousness is the human condition but to share habits and purpose is more difficult to negotiate as it requires durational and non-linear protest – because all social interactions lead to non-linearity’s – however this require a commitment to true and varied purposeful uninhibited resistance.

Does this warn against idealism? Or reinstate a new way of thinking idealism? In a way you could take the chance – chance is realised nicely in this sense – but I still don’t like the predominance of one idealism – ignorance, sameness, indifference – whatever it is. But then hope here lies with the writer reader relationship – the companionship of imaginations. The chance to achieve vital signs, or if it takes your fancy, to die “of exhaustion – a perfectly natural death.”

I begin training.

See through hand

Chris Kraus is quoted on Wikipedia, on her collection Video Green

“Collecting in its most primitive form implies a deep belief in the primacy and mystery of the object, as if the object was a wild thing…the object didn’t function best as a blank slate waiting to be written on by curatorial practice and art criticism.”

Here there is a wild tension between object as that which sees strait through us – or we are made naked by it to the point of visual impermanence, through me to it – making me transparent – and the object as a sustenance beyond (our organic dependence on) light, beyond our dependence on a combustion of form to turn out perception.

To state the obvious – we pass through our own body on the way to the unsurpassable object.

The Regenerate Lyric, Elisa New – Wallace Stevens Pg 79 Excerpt. Stevens in Parts of a World would ‘draw the expressive or reflective subject into the object. Romantic affect would be purged in favour of comic effect…the artificer now has no power of expression outside the object. Rather than reflect on experience, mimetically, the Stevensian speaker now becomes the naked object of reflection’

And not just the object of reflection but the thing or perception seen through by the staring object. In this way objects show us our transparency over time – and reflect ourselves back in their eyes as more objects leading to more objects.

Socialising with objects. The well-being of objects.

In the Anglo Saxon fragment ‘Judith’ the premonition of victory in battle reads, “They are doomed – as God showed through my hand!”

I’d like to relate to Anais Nin again on D.H. on his preoccupation with the body, specifically bodies at war.

“What drives him to despair is his very conviction of the sacredness of the body – and war is a monstrous holocaust of innumerable bodies.”

“Lawrence’s language makes a physical impression because he projected his physical response into the thing he observed”

Contrast object-ness to individual assertions and outbursts in Nin’s words:

“Individuality is always bursting forth, always destroying any permanency, as if in suspicion of form”

Suspicion of form is important in my poetry, because it makes the balance between a transparent utterance or voice and the objects that lead it through other objects, that allow it to socialise in the world.

Is this more a criticism of the anthropomorphised mannerisms of the object through which his protagonists seek individual substance – or the assertion of the object-ness permanency of the thing that rejects like a tenant at the end of a lease the impermanent resident? Kafka uses strangers, tourists – anyone without a permanent address or regular job! So the latter, if a little like the former is key here.

In one section of the collection I’d like to convey what its like to be a stranger in a world of things. To resist something in the structure, the deep form of the world and to be watched in the world as light is watched by casting itself about, this way and that, as if trying to free itself from a violent suspicion – to never know the last look in the eye – this is the fate of the individual, while it is also the hope of the social act of resistance – the chance companionship amongst vital objects.

Battle of the ‘I’ bulge

Pip Adam wrote in her Writing Journal in 2007 – Turbine

“I keep thinking about how first person narrative seems to have gone out of fashion with me a bit. I think it can only say one thing, which is something like this: ‘I am wrong about myself’. ‘You are a better person and you will see all the ways I am wrong about myself’. Hmm. Yeah, I feel that’s it basically. I think sometimes it can say ‘you are wrong about me, but not very often. I don’t think it can say ‘you are wrong about you’. I will test this thing at some point.”

Immediately I recognize the bulges of intimacy I’m so fascinated with when considering the voices in my writing and their relationship and proximity to the reader. Is it poignant to say ‘these voices are as wrong as you want them to be, and your’s is as wrong as they need it to be’. What is the connection between empathy and resistance to identification – even with one’s own reading voice? How am I going to get the reader to hear their reading voice? I think I need to start with a process of translation – of a ‘you’. Putting your words into my words?

The appeal of Monuments

When picturing the queue to the soul, the line and the travel of this work there is the appeal, the argument and the arrest of companionship. This is the image that I wanted to work through after going to: Between Moments and Monuments: Considering the future of Contemporary Sculpture in the Public Realm, a One Day Sculpture panel discussion.

“The individuality which each of us has got and which makes him a wayward, wilful, dangerous, untrustworthy quantity to every other individual, because every individuality is bound to react at some time or other against every other individuality without exception – or else lost its own integrity, because of the inevitable necessity of each individual to react away from any other individual, at certain times, human love is truly a relative thing, not an absolute.”

D. H. Lawrence states the paradox of asserting individual independence and the compelling appeal of others, of relationships and companionship throughout this process.

ap·peal

- an earnest or urgent request to somebody for something
- a request or campaign to raise money or resources
- the quality that makes somebody or something pleasant or desirable
- a formal request to a higher authority requesting a change in or confirmation of a decision
- the hearing of part or the whole of a previously tried case by a superior court, a request for a hearing, or the right to have such a hearing

Thinking about monuments brings up (historical) portraits. The memories circulated on their documents. Who are the equivalent sitters, subjects and personalities in art today I thought? Are the tics now perceived temporal and spacial enigmas, conundrums, or cheap tricks in the work? Perhaps they are now event based personalities – this suggests a communal or companionship based personality is asserting itself.

Impermanence and appeal to the time and history of the contemporary work is predominant rather than the representation of an existing reality. What does an objects resistance look like? What friction does this imperative appeal to? “In love there must be resistance’ writes Lawrence “We ought to pray to be resisted and resisted to the bitter end.” Anais Nin reasserts “There must be resistance in relationships. It is the basis of strength, of balance, of unison”.

At Alex’s housewarming last night I talked to Tom about his job as a council gardener. He mostly works in the cemetery. If you are one of the few living things around you attract attention – you are the beacon of conversation. In addition to the various talks he has with ‘old ladies’ and the morbid and/or curious, he describes the funereal monuments. There is grave of a cat memorialized in stone, a life-size representation of it being touched totem like by passers by. People often deposit things between its paws as if leaving a marker or two of their time of observation.

There is also another memorial he finds strange, of the woman and her four cats who all seem to be buried together in the same plot. Kate proposed that they’d all perished in a house fire, their ashes scraped together and laid to rest. It’s less pagan than the Egyptian mode of sacrificing animals with respect to company in the afterlife. Tom added that the ashes of the fridge were probably included in the mix so in a way its not that far from the truth of the scene – its appeal to a the cult of the afterlife – a monument that re-emphasises or reminds us about the simple act of observation and observing time.

Dorita Hannah quoted Battaile ‘monuments inspire fear’. She then went on to say ‘the ephemeral control of space’ is instituted in the name of imperatives of freedom and security, rhetoric imperatives. In the work of art there also needs to be a resistance beyond merely the drive to forge ahead or be moving ahead in the name of (aging) ideals. At all times a work needs to appeal to action, to constitute through this appeal fresh ideals that will offer us a healthy kind of companionship over time.

There is an emphasis on real time architecture to look at the expanding relation to resistance that continues to take place, in company, in companionship and in the appeal to companionship. All this makes me think that faith in specific forms of memory defines areas of time. Faith in the memory of the experience and its document or new monument.

In my own practice letting words and sculpture inhabit different arenas and audiences but coming together in the reading, performance or artist talk – the appeal of my intention to an audience considering it in relation to the written or exhibited work: My observation of the intention, the cheap trick of performance, the quantity of unknown prepared outcome – and the outcome to follow and follow.

[Public Forum: Between Moments and Monuments: Considering the future of Contemporary Sculpture in the Public Realm
Saturday 8 March,10.30am – 12.30pm, Pacific Blue Festival Club, Frank Kitts Park, Wellington.

Leading voices in contemporary art and performance will examine how artists are rethinking the concept of public sculpture. The forum will address temporary artistic responses to location; the role of performance and participation, and the capacity for temporary works to sustain permanency through the social imagination. Chaired by Rob Garrett - the panel will include Christina Barton, Claire Doherty, Dorita Hannah, Roman Ondak and Amy Howden-Chapman.]

companionship

I don’t tend to consider tense much in my poetry, perhaps under the misconception that it’s something more prominent in short fiction or prose. Maybe I just haven’t considered tense to be a priority when plotting the development of the voice of the poem, in comparison to character traits, tension between voices or image puns etc.

When reading James Brown, especially Favourite Monsters, I became aware that tense shifted quite fast, and tense didn’t just shift in the predictable modes of past, present and future but also seemed to encompass social scenes and historical contexts. These tense-scenes are not restricted to a linguistic frame i.e. was, is, will, but extend to such modes as quotation of other authors work, genres that bracket different historical moments, and the more general scene of ideals that the voice might be tied up in.

This suggests that tenses and shifts in tenses, with social-scene components also at work, can highlight key contradictions inherent in the thoughts and behavior of the voice of the poem as it develops for the reader. In this way tense expands to play a key part in realising the voice of the poem. Tenses establish the pace particular to the point of view of the voice and how they express this view.

Time through tense is in this way embedded in the formation of the voice at the instant it’s uttered.

So I looked up what tense means to clarify it for myself:

– a set of forms taken by a verb to indicate the time (and sometimes also the continuance or completeness) of the action in relation to the time of the utterance: the past tense.

ORIGIN Middle English (in the general sense [time]): from Old French tens, from Latin tempus ‘time.’

It will be interesting to explore the time of the action in relation to the time of the utterance when building up a voice in upcoming poems, and how the voice might be revealed as much through shifts in tense as details or images.

Damien Wilkins in our first writer’s discussion today said he was drawn to writing that teaches you how to read it as you go and how to behave in relation to the process of reading. This was tied to a sense of elasticity or pace of the writing, the author’s breathing rhythm and how this informed both the structure of the work and the reader’s sense of companionship with the text. If the reader is being shown the skills needed to be a companion to the text, to be there till the end because of this respect that’s instituted, then the author’s tone or voice is most compelling, and their triumph more credible and deserving from the reader’s perspective.

James Brown said that dialogue of voices is not restricted to a shared sense of meaning (between two characters for example) or values, rather it also happens in the crossfire and the misfires or thwarted communication. Richard Prince mistakes the meaning of the Author, though the incongruity of shared meaning and intention leads to another kind of dialogue, one in which new priorities or agendas are revealed.

This ties in to what I was thinking last time I wrote about companion memory that runs parallel to a new interpretation and that has its say on its present institution in modes beyond mere sentimental reflection. These other modes could include the ability to empathise, to realise a dialogue that might fail due to a lack of common ground, which in itself might be revealing beyond the desire to re-institute what is now past.

In this instance we could see opposites in a more flexible way – a pair of opposites could simply show that a thing has at some point or another made an appeal to another thing. Independence appeals to dependence, habits appeal to erratic temptations and in this sense something makes a case (or simply puts up an argument) that’s as significant as any relation that’s formed.

This is especially true when considering the Richard Prince poem in which the fight and its ‘pick up line’ allow for an obscure bond to form between the voices in the poem at that moment of misunderstanding – as if they understood all along that the confrontation would lead to nothing more than picking each other up off their prejudices even if just for a moment and hooking up, if strangely, because they have somehow appealed to each other as well as generated a commotion.

Brown also spoke a lot about using cheap tricks, such as starting with an image, making you forget about it then reminding you of it again, like in his poem about the balloon in the subject’s stomach. Also shifts in tenses, or jokes that let the reader feel ‘in on it’ even as we realise it’s not designed primarily to lead us to our senses. I think considering jokes and puns more in my poetry will be important over the next few months as it will be a way for me to identify where the diologue is really happening and what it is appealing to.

Later on Damien talked about the tendency not to encourage character development through big action sequences. James talked about the limitations of stream of consciousness in voice development in the poem. James’ use of impersonal or spare language while maintaining and instituting a deferred dramatic monologue provoke the stream of consciousness mode.

I find this interesting in the sense that it could be one way of more clearly playing with prejudices of communication in the development of the voice of the poem.

And Damien’s comments could also be a way of emphasising the significance of non-linearities which mere adhesion to action sequences can undermine, and further weaken the elasticity and necessary tension of prejudices, forming and unwinding, that establish the tone of the prose and the readers ability to invest companionship in the work.