An email from Dale Smith:
Dear Ron,
Thanks for addressing my notebook / poem question on your
blog today.
You open up a lot for consideration. Ken Irby wrote to me about it, also going
back to the 19th c for some origins. He mentioned Thoreau specifically, and
Whitman's "Specimen
Days" as exemplary strategies for notebook narratives in American Lit.
It is interesting though how the New Americans really pick up on the format.
Olson, as you point out, freed a lot of ground (after Pound, WCW, HD et al),
and the Asian influence from Whalen, Snyder and Kyger (she referred me once
enthusiastically to Lady Murasaki's Pillow
Book) really opens some day book possibilities in poetry.
What's most interesting to me is how new formations of
narrative are derived from this process of record and observation. An extension
of narrative away from specific important events, memory-based
moments-of-significance or any other subject-laden organization is part of the
journal's day-to-day use. It instead deepens observations and penetrations of
diverse fields that are in fluctuation, barely visible except as they catch the
senses at a particular moment. Bob Grenier in Narrative*,
his Curriculum of the Soul contribution, looks at the etymology of the word
Narrative, relating it to Gnosis – Knowledge – from the root Narr. Gnosis, relations through language and perceptive
recordings of daily phenomena become the organizing principle of narrative for
the New Americans. Process is valued over stasis, subjective interaction over
objective evaluation. Story by extension becomes an ongoing act of attention at
the limits of language and things, nudged up next to the Unknown, in the best
sense. At its worst, I suppose, you might get rudimentary daily traffic. But
that seems to be the Art of this journaling process in poetry, to fine tune the
attentions to what matters at the limits, not within the confines of the known.
Domestic routine, in a sense, becomes Romance or Adventure, in that all
relations are refigured each day in the process of finding words in relation to
the world.
You might see a more social context for the uses of
journals in this kind of writing. In a way I can see its transformative
potential as a kind of narrative that runs against the meta-narratives of
State. But I'm running aground now in speculation-ville.
Thanks for grounding an answer to my question in specific social and historical
contexts.
It's interesting you bring up Coolidge, though I see why
you do. I'll look at those books you mention by him. Where do you think this
kind of narrative has gone now? How has it transformed into contemporary
writing, if at all?
Anyway, thanks again for your insightful comments. This
helps me out with some things I've been working on in relation to this topic.
Hope all's well.
Dale
·
In
fact, Grenier’s volume in the Curriculum of the
Soul series is called Attention – RS
