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<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/'>
Silliman's Blog
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<p class='description'><span>A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.</span></p>
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Showing posts with label <b>process</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<div class='status-msg-hidden'>Showing posts with label <b>process</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, January 12, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It&#8217;s rare for a poet to
radically change the primary drive of their verse as they age. If anything, the
very opposite is more apt to occur, for the poet to progressively stand more revealed,
for the approach to the poem to move closer &amp; closer to those first
instincts toward writing that drove them to the poem, that ever so uneconomic
pursuit, whether at age ten, 17 or perhaps 35. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;ve always thought that
this was because the largest impediment to writing was not lack of training or
of skill, but rather the degree of cultural baggage that we &#8211; I&#8217;m including
myself here as much as anyone &#8211; bring to the poem, the instant we go from
thinking about writing, a condition of absolute desire, to the actual attempt
to make literature, to get words onto paper. There is an enormous gap between
that first state &amp; the second, one that we all perpetually fill with all
manner of extraneous crap, everything that we imagine that Literature (capital
L) is supposed to be. When we&#8217;re just starting out &#8211; &amp; I&#8217;m definitely
speaking for myself here &#8211; it&#8217;s almost impossible to find the poem through the
Literature. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thus a good writing program
would not only be one that introduced the fledgling poet to all the possible
strains that are being explored (&amp; have been, historically) in the poem,
but one also that will help the poet to strip away whatever might prove
inessential. So much of growing up as a poet has to do with unlearning as much
(if not more) than it does learning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I was ruminating over this
while reading Alan Davies&#8217; admirable new chapbook, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Book 2</i>, published conjointly by Other Publications (Alan&#8217;s own
label) with Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. The Alan Davies I first knew through
correspondence back in the early 1970s was an ardent &amp; exceptionally
well-educated surrealist out of </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Boston</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">. The impulse to the surreal is still completely
visible now thirty years later. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Book 2</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> is
a single 26-page poem &#8211; I don&#8217;t know if there is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Book 1</i> somewhere.* Stanzas alternate their orientation toward the
margin &amp; linebreaks:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">And then the weepings<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">start</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> to
wail<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">all</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> over
the pale green bodices<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">of</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> hills<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">A
little bit of cadenced<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: right;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">buttery</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> softness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: right;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">envelops</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> this compact hardness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: right;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">and</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> lets us feel that we have <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: right;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">a</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> somewhat<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: right;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">less</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> hard heart<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: right;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Somewhere some hunger still
lunges<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The
warm swallowed sallow sadness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: right;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">that</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> time micturates<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: right;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">almost</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> euphemistically<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: right;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">settle</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> like a nettle<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: right;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">in</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> a warm breeze<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: right;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Often throughout this work,
as in this passage, multiple things are going on at once. At one level, it is a
surrealist text, although surrealism of a late &amp; particularly North
American kind, one that is as aware of </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Barrett Watten</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, Jerry Estrin &amp; Dan Davidson as it is of <span class="SpellE">Octavio</span> Paz or Andre Bréton. At a second level, however,
the poem builds on surrealism&#8217;s proclivity toward using nouns as absolutes
rather than as referential signs to offer a curiously sentimental satire, sort
of Bréton as read through Jeff Koons. Davies&#8217; ear is also active &#8211; that last
stanza above moves radically toward a different prosodic resolution with every
single line. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;m intrigued, to say the
least, at the idea of someone who can use a literary tendency lovingly, as
Davies does here, while in the same moment ratcheting up its characteristic
features into a text that is more than just a little over-the-top. In part, he
does this by understanding the separateness of eye &amp; ear in the poem &amp;
using them &#8211; simultaneously &#8211; to different ends. It&#8217;s not a question here of
the bicameral mind so much as it is of the ability of a reader to multitask
within the performance of the reading itself. It&#8217;s not an uncommon human
experience &#8211; anyone who has eaten while driving or surfed the web while talking
on the phone will have exercised similarly divergent skills &#8211; what&#8217;s remarkable
is that Davies manages to set this up within the poem itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Davies has earned his
reputation as an artist who is unafraid to try the outrageous, but a work like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Book 2</i> demonstrates that he does so with
a purpose. Underneath the dream syntax of surrealism has always lurked an
idealized landscape, a certain tragic heroism visible, say, in the moonscapes
of a Dali or <span class="SpellE">Tanguy</span>, and which comes across in poetry
as an unspecified urgency. Davies pushes his imagery to the point of parody
&amp; uses sound to undercut any residual earnestness. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Davies goes further, letting
the reader in on the process:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Waiting for the words<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">appended</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">willing</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> and
waiting<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Or should they then<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">up</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> ended
be<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Or be up ended<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .5in; text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Squalling
birds<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .5in; text-align: right;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">unseen</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> but heard<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .5in; text-align: right;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">so</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> seen<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I try to imagine how Davies
could have written this &#8211; it&#8217;s mysterious almost in the same way that Christian
Bök&#8217;s ability to create parallel poems using the same letters in the same
order, but with different words, is mysterious. It&#8217;s not just that every stanza,
sometimes every line, undercuts the ones above, but <span class="GramE">that</span>
they often perform this process on themselves. Thus this &#8220;little gerbil
fettered thing&#8221; is completely serious, for all of its flamboyant nonsense. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Davies has moved so far
inside his original surrealist impulses as to have arrived at some new place
altogether. An interesting point of contrast might be someone like Ashbery,
whose surrealism is far softer, almost decorative, &amp; whose wit is more
consciously (&amp; cautiously) subtle &#8211; in a place where subtlety is not
necessarily a value. If Ashbery&#8217;s texts are perfect little luxury machines of
language, Davies is mounting a far more serious argument with a far sillier
façade. If you rip the language apart, what lies underneath?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">*<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385147325">Book
Two</a></i> also happens to be the title of a work by </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Thomas Meyer</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> that was excerpted in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">House Organ</i> &amp; discussed here
previously. I now know that Meyer&#8217;s piece is part of a larger booklength poem,
called <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coromandel</i></span>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, January 08, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The representation of art as
a process in cinema is a perpetually vexing situation. I was reminded of this
as I was watching <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0120679">Frida</a></i> the other night, an
excellent biopic that makes great use of Frida Kahlo&#8217;s paintings as primary
visual elements in the structure of the film, somewhat reminiscent of the way
Kurosawa used Van Gogh&#8217;s paintings in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0100998">Dreams</a></i>. Yet at the same time,
no one in the movie ever seriously <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">discusses</i>
painting &#8211; the one point at which the film approaches the question is the one
cringe-making moment in the script, Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) telling Frida
Kahlo (Salma Hayek) that &#8220;I only paint what I see &#8211; you paint what&#8217;s in here,&#8221;
tapping her on the chest.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This in turn recalled the
scene in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0181536">Finding Forrester</a></i> in which
Sean Connery reads the &#8220;wonderful&#8221; prose of his protégé at the climactic moment
&amp; the volume of the musical score rises up to literally drown out the words
&#8211; this is how we know just how wonderful the prose really is.* From <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0092618">Barfly</a>
</i>&#8211; think of that title as an adverb &#8211; to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0102511">Naked Lunch</a></i>, Hollywood has
generally done a dreadful job figuring the process of writing. The
sanctification of Pablo Neruda in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0110877">Il <span class="SpellE">Postino</span></a>
</i>is not an improvement, really. Indeed, the closest thing I&#8217;ve ever seen to
a process that even remotely reminds me of how a poet works is the way in which
notebooks are used in some <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Name?Godard,+Jean-Luc">Jean-Luc
Godard</a> films from the 1960s.** <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The crux of the problem, of
course, is that writing is not an inherently &#8220;cinematic&#8221; activity. Usually it&#8217;s
solitary and often it&#8217;s conducted in utter silence. The writer&#8217;s furrowed brow
as he/she crosses out a word to insert another is about as &#8220;dramatic&#8221; as it
gets, unless, say, one is involved in something unusual, such as Ginsberg
dictating Wichita Vortex Sutra into a tape recorder while tooling around with <span class="SpellE">Orlovsky</span> &amp; Co. in a VW minivan in the American
heartland. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In theory, the visual arts
should be easier to represent because &#8211; hey! &#8211; <span class="GramE">they&#8217;re</span>
visual. And, in fact, some of the best films about artists have been about
painting, such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0115632">Basquiat</a></i> &#8211; a film by a
painter as well as about one &#8211; or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0183659">Pollock</a></i>. But, from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0324937">Dr.
<span class="SpellE">Zhivago</span></a> </i>to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0112461">The Basketball Diaries</a>,</i>
films about poets tend to be about everything but the writing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There are of course decent
documentaries about individual poets, such as the Richard Lerner-Lewis <span class="SpellE">MacAdams</span> production of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0090312"><span class="GramE">What</span>
Happened to Kerouac?</a> </i><span class="GramE">as</span> well as films by
poets, from <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Name?Child,+Abigail">Abigail Child</a>
at one end of the spectrum to <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Name?Auster,+Paul">Paul
Auster</a> &amp; <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Name?Alexie,+Sherman">Sherman <span class="SpellE">Alexie</span></a> at the other. At that latter end of the
spectrum, at least, any poetic background, post-avant or otherwise, appears to
be almost entirely coincidental. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">If poetry has become largely
&#8220;unrepresentable&#8221; &#8211; or perhaps only &#8220;misrepresentable&#8221; &#8211; from the perspective
of at least commercial cinema, it is by no means the only occupation so
afflicted. Yet the implications for a practice that has been culturally defined
as &#8220;significant&#8221; &amp; even &#8220;romantic&#8221; but which can only be indirectly figured
cinematically are significant in terms of poetry&#8217;s ongoing attempts to create a
stable social space for its own activity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* This in a
film with Charles Bernstein as Dr. Simon. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** Godard
also pioneered the music-drowns-out-the-dialog technique in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0062480">Week
End</a></i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>although with a far more
Brechtian purpose in mind. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, December 31, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Waking this morning at 6:00
to write three pages of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zyxt,</i> the
last section of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Alphabet</i>, out in
the notebook &#8211; it will probably translate down into a single page of typescript
when I get to that &#8211; leaves me drained, exhausted. The process only took an
hour, maybe 45 minutes, once I subtract the time it took to rise, brush my
teeth &amp; shuffle downstairs. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I began with a sentence
describing a scene from a dream, not one I had last night, but rather the night
before, that was still nagging at me. I had described the dream yesterday
afternoon to </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Krishna</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">, who commented &#8220;Well, that&#8217;s a nightmare,&#8221; though it
had not felt like one to me. It had seemed more strange than repellant. Because
I had described it to her yesterday, I retained enough of the detail to sketch
out what I wanted this morning, then proceeding from my Palm Pilot to add an
additional 23 sentences from the 156 currently stored there for just this
purpose, plus two others I wrote on the spot because they seemed necessary. It
will all appear as a single stanza. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Perhaps because of all the
blogging I&#8217;ve done of late, I was paying attention in the back of my mind as I
worked as to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">why</i> I was placing this
or that sentence into the specific sequence as I did, recalling Chris <span class="SpellE">Stroffolino&#8217;s</span> words about the nature of meaning, thinking
(quite vaguely, I must admit) that I was after what I could only call &#8211; at
least at this close proximity &#8211;a music of emotions I had some sense of attempting
to orchestrate. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">When I initially write (or,
as I often think of it, &#8220;collect&#8221;) sentences that I might use in work, the
process often feels pretty casual &#8211; there is, after all, no requirement that I
actually use one if later it doesn&#8217;t feel right or I can&#8217;t find the appropriate
position for it in my work. Often such sentences are things I&#8217;ve heard, or
(more often) variations on things I&#8217;ve heard. I can collect these sentences in
the middle of business meetings without losing the thread of discussion &amp;
have even composed in the middle of eye surgery. But the process seldom has the
&#8220;feeling tone&#8221; of writing, as such. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Putting sentences together,
on the other hand, is heavy lifting, an exceptionally intense process that I
can&#8217;t do every day &#8211; unless of course I have set up some system to enable that
(the exact same system I&#8217;m using these days for the blog). Which is why, when I
was asked/told by that questioner earlier this year that my work was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2384276247">all
revision</a></i>, it did not ring true. No, this putting together is for me the
true act of writing. Everything else is adjunct.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I chose the 23 sentences I
ended up using from the oldest of my collection of &#8220;raw&#8221; material &#8211; going
through maybe one-third of the total group at least casually before I honed in
on the ones I wanted to use. One sentence that I&#8217;d initially thought to use, I
held back &#8211; it comes to close to the territory of the dream and would make more
sense to me to put it into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zyxt</i></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">later, when it will serve not only all of its
internal functions &amp; whatever other local ones I decide that I want it to
play, but also to harken back to this particular instance of the dream. Yet
that sentence deferred is itself perhaps six months old &amp; could easily be
another six months older before it gets used. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Of the 23 collected
sentences, I made changes in no more than six in incorporating them here. Most were
minor corrections &#8211; and awkward phrasing or a missing word &#8211; but in one I added
a single word that I&#8217;d not thought of previously that made the sentence
suddenly lock into the &#8220;music of emotions&#8221; I was after. That one word made me
feel enormously happy &#8211; it proved as important as the raw sentence itself &#8211;
which was interesting in part because this is a relatively somber moment in the
work and I was able to work on that while experiencing a very different sense
toward the writing itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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