Silkscreen+Poetry: Ben Chlapek+Rich Smith

The premise: Ben draws/prints images based on my poems. We were hoping Ben's childish aesthetic and we'll say "youthful" script would play well with my jumpy, excited voice.

What happened: Lots of late night promises. Lots of me decrying the state of poetry. Lots of saying things like "we have to make artifacts!” Lots of burritos in the late afternoon the day after. But mostly lots of living in Ben's head, lots of Ben living in my head, lots of not worrying about our “work,” lots of being happy about doing something for the fun of it, lots of relief from the solitude and pressure that often accompany the composition process of both arts.

Question: Do the different fonts undercut the poem? Would the poem be incredibly uninteresting without the fonts? Do both mediums work in tandem to create an interesting artifact? Does one art add prestige to the other? My friend "Jassie Bowles" says, "child's play."

Ben spends hours (yes, hours) on InDesign meticulously choosing which scribbly "y" to use out of a mess of scribbly ys. He would write a poem down on the sheet of paper, and then he would repeat letters he deemed unsatisfactory. A page might look like this:

Poem

This is my poem about you.

I like you.

P p P T T T m m m mm

Playing with motifs! We thought that the images could resonate not just with each poem, but with themselves. Risk: playing "find the button" on every page, could set off Where's Waldo impulse in reader, might not "work."

Teaching Experimentally

Many of those who write also teach and many of those who teach follow a familiar workshop methodology. In his essay “Writers of Experiment,” which appeared in the volume 17 feature on the future of experimental writing, Richard Sonnenmoser wonders why there are so few experiments in the pedagogy of creative writing and shares his own experience trying to break away from the workshop model:

“Once, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, I co-taught an experimental writing course, Lex Ed: The Art of Dictionarymaking. My co-teacher, compositionist Sarah Stanley, and I wanted to teach a class where students would write original, novel definitions. We wanted to teach experimentally, too, so our only pedagogical plan was for everyone to write and share; we’d all offer critique. Eventually we’d publish the definitions. Two weeks into the term, we created our syllabus.

We decided as a class on February 13, 2007 that we will be collaborating to produce a textual dictionary whose project will be to define many of the “weeds” of the English language. The Weeds Dictionary (working title) was born during our discussion of Jill Lepore’s The New Yorker article on lexicographer Noah Webster, “Noah’s Mark.” More specifically, our idea sprang from Lepore’s citation of Joseph Dennie, editor of the Gazette of the United States, a vocal critic of Webster’s project. “If, as Mr. Webster asserts,” Dennie editorializes, “it is true that many new words have already crept into the language of theUnited States, he would be much better employed in rooting out those anxious weeds, than in mingling them with the flowers.”

In producing Rooted: An Alternative Dictionary we wanted to take Dennie’s metaphor—some words are weeds, others are flowers—and to twist it and play with it until we’d created a dictionary of (and for?) the weeds. Colleagues would sometimes ask what our students were writing. After a while I found a facile answer: prose poems. By definition, we were doing experimental writing. Yet during class meetings we used a workshop model popular in the U.S. since the 1940s. We had a syllabus with an attendance policy. We met in a classroom on campus. Without much resistance, without really discussing it, we’d fallen into prose poetry; we were making art objects with the English language. So what exactly was the experiment?”

Have you ever been in or taught a creative writing class that successfully employed methods other than workshop? What are the best and worst experiences you’ve had in traditional workshops?

Ever-Smaller Screens of Comprehension

At our AWP panel on experimental writing this past February a lively conversation arose about the experiments technology and new media are making possible. In Volume 17, Joe Bonomo writes about a childhood memory from fractured perspectives that include those seen through the lens of Wikipedia, Twitter, the Track Changes function on a Word document. He writes:

Near the swing set during recess. N. on the swings. She swung and her plaid skirt lifted and I saw her sky-blue underwear. She squealed.

Mon Sep 20 11:01:23 2010 via web

Joe Bonomo is remembering N. on the swing set and that thing that happened.

4 hours ago clear

st&ing nr d swing set durin recess @ st andrew d apostle. N. s on d swings. she pumps her lgz n grips d chain n leans bac n d wind n her hair streams n she swings upward n her plaid skirt lifts +I C her sky-blue undies.  

Later in the essay he adds:

Tweets, updates, emails, texts, confessional, autobiographical. Montaigne in his tower; me at my computer. Have we reached the saturation point? Ur-stories are collapsing on top of other ur-stories. We must be made to matter. Will the future of personal writing be composed of images, flash, tinier paragraphs, infinitely more pixels, infinitely more memory, smaller screens of comprehension?

Though the essay makes use of these ever-smaller screens of comprehension, it also celebrates the search for a holistic understanding all these screens complicate, but don’t necessarily obliterate. Bonomo quotes Degas: “It is very well to copy what one sees; it’s much better to draw what one has retained in one’s memory. It is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.”

Post-modernisms, deconstructionism, so many other theoretical –isms have insisted our reality has become increasingly fractured, mutable, and uncertain. Literature only reminds us that all an illusion. Is it delusional to think the chaos of new media in collaboration with imagination and memory might provide a way to make our lives matter again? Is it naïve to believe in a saturation point where fragmented perspectives coalesce into a fixed meaning?

Is Experimentation Passe?

It got quiet here at the QAE blog in the past few months. That’s because we were busy putting together the new issue (if you’ve subscribed, it should arrive in your mailbox any day now). Volume 17 includes a critical feature, “The Future of Creative Writing.” We’ll be excerpting from the many thoughtful essays in that feature here on the blog, but today we’d like to give you a chance to respond to the questions we asked a number of writers:

“Ezra Pound’s admonition to 'make it new' is nearly a century old. The prose poem is over one hundred years old, language poetry is settling into its middle age, even flash fiction and the lyric essay are comfortably familiar; yet these modes dominate our conversations about experiments in literature. We find ourselves in the paradoxical position where radical experimentation has become a predictable norm. Moreover, in recent years the term experimental has been used to describe an increasingly specific range of familiar and canonical forms that emphasize language over narrative and fragmentation over linearity.... Are there are other ways to define experimental writing? What new forms or variations will the next generation of writing bring? Where do we go from here?”

Writers, what do you think? Readers, what do you want to read?

Technological Rebellion in Okubo’s Citizen 13660

Quarter After Eight is sponsoring (along with the Ohio University Department of English) a conference, "Defining the New: Experiments and Innovations in English Studies" October 22-23 and we're sharing previews of conference presentations. Here's an excerpt from Chris Sims' critical discussion of Okubo's Citizen 13660 that draws on Bachelard's theories about technologically enabled actualization:

"...One of the reasons I chose Okubo’s Citizen 13660 is because the terse, journalistic prose seems more approachable than some denser material and I can use this clarity to establish the framework for the lens with which I will read these texts. Page eight features an illustration of Miné and her brother at home hearing the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This moment is particularly important because it displays an image of the home as they have constructed it. They are pictured wearing unique, well-fitting clothing, eating a home cooked breakfast, and listening to their radio next to a sink with running water. As members of the larger American community they have access to technology that provides information, running water, heat, and comfort. Inside the space of their home they are free to daydream and they “wondered what this [the attack] would mean to us and other people of Japanese descent in the United States” (Okubo 8). They are not at this moment afraid, but rather curious. Miné’s brother appears to almost lazily absorb the news. The patterns of their shirts match the patterns of the floor tiles and the curtains, underscoring their interconnectedness to their home. Miné and her brother are not wealthy, but the radio stands out as an Extravagant technological artifact. This picture of home emphasizes that the Okubo’s are perhaps on the rise and are able to make choices not based on Necessity, but Extravagant choices grounded in desire.

Miné even goes so far to say “I had a good home” (Okubo 7). This is noteworthy for two reasons. One, because she uses the first person pronoun “I,” which becomes absent from the narrative while Miné is in a camp. Because the Okubo’s have access to their own private home-space, Miné can form a singular identity and feels like a human being. And secondly, this is also important because it foreshadows Bachelard’s sentiments that a home is the first step in technologically enabled actualization. When humans do not have shelter, food, or water their internal drive shifts away from metaphysical inquires of self and turns to biological Necessities. Miné makes it known that the information technology of information telegrams “fixed everything” and allowed her to find a home. Her mother’s death disrupts her settling in, but she soon moves in “with a younger brother at Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay region” (Okubo 6-7). What is important for Miné as an immigrant is to have a stable location she can call home. Home-building is always the first step on the path of self-actualization and even early on Miné is concerned with the business of home..."

Truth and Fiction in Gertrude Stein's War Narratives

Quarter After Eight is sponsoring (along with the Ohio University Department of English) a conference, "Defining the New: Experiments and Innovations in English Studies" October 22-23 and we're sharing a taste of what's to come. Here's a snippet from Jessica Alexander's essay, "No History Is Proof Against Everything," which explores how writers invent their pasts:

"Gore Vidal opens his memoir Palimpsest, by drawing a distinction between autobiography and memoir.  According to Vidal, “a memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts, double checked”(3).  Vidal’s definition distinguishes between the past that one constructs through memories, and the past that one constructs through external verification; the past that one experiences and the past that one must learn; a difference that Getrude Stein’s Wars I Have Seen challenges.

Wars I Have Seen shares characteristics common to war narratives, memoirs, autobiographies, and fiction.  Stein’s subversion of the traditional standards of each genre assesses the definitive boundaries between them and illustrates their limitations. Constructing an historical narrative that is neither detached, nor analytical, and relying on memories, fictions, and anecdotes to illustrate the historical moment, Stein calls into question traditional historical sources, and the assumed objectivity of historicists.  

As if anticipating Vidal’s remarks Stein begins Wars I Have Seen with “I do not know whether to put in the things I do not remember as well as the things I do remember.” (3).   Underscoring the association between memory and memoir and challenging Vidal’s dichotomy, Stein’s self-conscious assertion simultaneously suggests that her text is a memoir, while calling its status as such into question.  Similarly, the closest most critics come to classifying Wars I Have Seen, is in their assumption that it requires a lengthy argument to prove its disqualification from a particular genre.   The struggle to situate the narrative within a genre, such as history, autobiography or memoir, arises not so much from the texts failure to embody the characteristics of those genres, but rather, as illustrated in the above example, from its failure to remain within the bounds prescribed to each genre.  Stein’s transgressions, far from illustrating an ignorance of the injunctions of each narrative mode, indicate an acute awareness of the principles circumscribing history, memoir and fiction.  Her refusal to remain within the limitations of each calls the nature of their distinctions into question.    

In Messages from History Stein claims that “No history is proof against everything”(25).  Like many of Stein’s constructions, there is more than one way to read the line.  “No history” can be read either as the absence of history, as in “no shirt, no shoes, no service”, or as an expression of the limitations of each discrete historical narrative.  Both readings assume that history has the power to distinguish between fact and fiction.  The latter interpretation, which illustrates the limitations of each historical narrative, suggests that we interpret history as a means of negating memories.  A history of World War II can disprove a memory of World War II, but it cannot disprove being born in Baltimore, or the taste of Vienna beer. A particular historical narrative may call a particular memory into question, and may disprove the validity of that memory, but no single historical narrative can disprove everything, and there are component features of events that dates and facts fail to account for..." 

You can hear the rest of this essay at "Defining the New: Experiments and Innovations in English Studies," which will be free and open to the public. You can find more information about the conference at www.english.ohiou.edu/conference/.

 

Alex Cigale On Found Forms

It's been 14 years since Alex Cigale outlined his poetics of found forms in Quarter After Eight volume 2, 140 years since Lautreamont articulated his; however, the questions they raise remain provocative. What and how much can/should writers borrow not only from each other but from the culture at large?

"...the granddaddy of them all, of all these modernists, was Isidore Ducasse, better known as Lautreamont. It was his phrase—"the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table"—a prescription for wild, undirected beauty, that served as the definition for Surrealism. In 1870, in his Poesies, Lautreamont was already writing, 'Personal poetry has had its day. . . Let us gather up again the thread of impersonal poetry, rudely interrupted since the birth of the manque philosopher of Ferney, since that great abortion Voltaire.' Also, 'Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps an author's sentences tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.' ...

I will often clip a newspaper article and carry it around (if not literally then in my head), sometimes for years, until the time that I feel comfortable, confident of having fully assimilated its contents. One of the first 'founds' I composed was 'India Widow's Death at. . . ,' its enigmatic title simply the first seven syllables of The New York Times headline from an article on the Hindu custom of sati, the ritual self-immolation of a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. The organizing principles of this 'poem' were syllabics (and its associated stanza forms) and montage, the French for 'arrangement.' In this instance, during the lengthy period of absorption, I was haunted by a memory likely to be familiar to most members of the generation that came of age in the 1970s: an image of a human form in flames, the photo of a Buddhist priest whose self-immolation in protest of the Vietnamese Invasion of Kampuchea in 1972 caught the world's attention. This photograph, the recorded image, was potent enough to attain the status of icon. In his Stardust Memories, Woody Allen paid homage once again to Ingmar Bergman (who had used it twice in Persona) by blowing the image up to cover an entire wall in the apartment of the main character.

My borrowings are verbatim. Just as there is in our cultural repository a pool of resonant Images (Jung would have said these are fed by the collective unconscious; similar to Yeats's Spiritus Mundi), so the quality of language which makes it memorable seems to me to draw on pre-existent forms that cannot be improved upon by the mere 'author.' Noam Chomsky's ideas about grammar being innate also square nicely with this notion. Syntax following nearly organic laws would seem to confirm the writer's experience of having to whittle language down to its purest-syntactically, aurally, visually-most precise yet economized configurations. In this Aristotelian sense, writing then is a search for and the discovery of these 'ideal forms.'"

You can read the entire essay at http://www.quarteraftereight.org/cigale.htm.