How do I decide what’s right for me?

 

As quickly as possible, with as little thought into the decision as I can humanly muster. It’s better, for me at least, to feel it rather than to think it. One of the major reasons that I work in notebooks the way I do is that the process of using ink & pen in a bound volume minimizes the opportunities to scroll around & contemplate larger structures. From my perspective, the most important moment in a prose poem is that which occurs between the period of one sentence & the capital letter than initiates the next. No two blank spaces are alike & there are moments when I think of the sentences primarily as a way of setting those spaces up & as if it were the spaces that were the true strokes of the painting. I can, when I am really in the zone, when I’m writing & sometimes when I’m in a reading as well, literally hear those spaces just as I do the softer ones between words, let alone the half-hidden ones you can find within words if you just listen closely. Silence is so much a part of noise yet we so seldom give it heed.

 

I am very much a sound driven writer. Ketjak, my first really serious work, was above all else an argument with Gertrude Stein over the sweetness of her tones. I wanted to pump her texts full of insulin, bring down the ding-dong quality, secularize those consonants, deflate the vowels. And it’s not because I don’t love her writing.

 

Sound is very much a liquid. We’re immersed in it, bathed in its waves. Even if you’re in an anechoic chamber – and I’ve been in a few of them lately – it’s never silent. One’s body hums right along, synapses chime, the clatter of bloodflow is as loud as the subway. Yet that is the closest I will ever get to “pure” silence. I’ve approached it only once in the real world, so-called, on a cold February morning in 1978 near Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. It’s like trying to see the night sky without the light pollution of cities – you have to go a long way to do it.

 

So if I say I go with the flow in deciding what’s right for me, I’m not being facetious exactly. Rather the only way to get to those spaces I’m after, literally the blank spaces, is to move very quickly. When I sit down with a notebook if I start to slow down, I know it’s over, the sitting is done. It was Steve Benson who first made me conscious of the sitting as a unit of writing, possibly he got that from Zoketsu Norman Fischer. Articulating that space is really what Paradise is all “about.” One sitting, one paragraph. That’s even the meaning of its title.

 

When I work with larger structures, what they really are, at least when they work, are territories in which I can get to these spaces, these moments. I bring in larger thematic elements as much because they’re pleasurable & because I’m an obsessive thinker, my wife complains that I’m never “off.” It’s almost as if I build a playground and I can spend an enormous amount of time thinking through possible forms before I begin writing. But I know very quickly whether or not it’s working. And if it’s not, I can discard it.

 

But if one’s life is one writing – and I really think it is – then the evolution, articulation of that writing has to be capable of incorporating change, growth, even contradiction. Not every form can do that. Living one’s life by 30-line poems perfectly designed for writing contests isn’t a way of approaching that unless one operates by a very specific discipline.

 

I’m right now in the earliest stages of Universe. I have a dozen or so pages of Revelator, a hundred or so other sentences on my Palm Pilot that eventually will be deployed in another work, a couple of short pieces that are part of a third one – these latter two have no names as yet, it’s too early, I’m not even sure what the form is for one of them. Originally I’d contemplated Revelator as part of a quartet – one way of approaching Universe might be to think of it as 90 such quartets – and yet I’ve begun to realize that there are other possibilities of relation that might be articulated across a 360-part structure envisioned as a single turn, and I’m beginning to wonder how Revelator might be able to bring those potentialities up to the fore. Yet when I’m writing in my notebook, all I’m ever writing is this word, that word, this.