Mark Tursi is working on a dissertation & sent me a question, which follows. He warns that, if I post my response to this blog, any commentary thereon in the Squawkbox tool might also become part of his process:
In The Chinese Notebook, which was just recently re-released online by UBU Editions (2004), you suggest, “Perhaps poetry is an activity and not a form at all.” I find this a particularly interesting proposition in lieu of the various forms throughout all of The Age of Huts: Sunset Debris which is all questions; 2197 which is largely verse form with a few sections of prose; and, finally, The Chinese Notebooks which is enumerated prose paragraphs. There has, of course, been a lot of critical writing that argues that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry is largely concerned with process rather than product, and you yourself suggest in the Afterword to the 2002 edition of In the American Tree that writing is “a means of thinking, an active process” and “shared thinking.” But, I wonder, to what extent your writing is concerned more with activity rather than process (or form or product), as you seem to suggest? That is, I think there is a slight nuance in meaning here that is rather revealing. On the one hand, your work seems to a reveal an obsession with form (e.g. The Age of Huts and The Alphabet), but on the other, you seem more concerned with writing as an act (activity), first and foremost (esp. your blog and The Alphabet perhaps!?), rather than as a form existing outside of the act itself or even the process (procedure), except how it actual comes to exist as an intentional and self-reflexive act. And, if the ‘intention’ and ‘the poetry’ are identical which you suggest a few lines later in The Chinese Notebook, isn’t the act and the form one in the same? And, back to your suggestion and following question: “Would this definition satisfy Duncan?” I wonder if you could elaborate a bit more on these distinctions (or lack of) between act and process, act and form?
I have a couple of different, possibly conflicting reactions as I read this – indeed, that latter sense has delayed me from responding to it for quite some time – but the strongest & most immediate one is a distrust in the way that the term “form” is being applied here, which I read as “exoskeletal pattern.” The description of 2197 is the give-away here, precisely because it is so inexact. The work consists of 13 poems, all constructed from the collision of 169 different sentences with one another – the title refers to the number of sentences in the work as a whole. When sentences “collide,” the grammatical structure of one is used to house the “content” words of the other. 2197 thus comes closest to the conception of form you pose, yet it is the one that is – to my reading of your question – the work in The Age of Huts that is least recognized as such.
Yet how much of that poem is that reiterative structure – which is not without its problems – and how much of the work’s “true” form is my own experience of working on it in notebooks – one of which contained nothing but the numerical plan of which sentence was to serve as the syntactic domain here, which as the source for signifiers? How much is involved in writing it specifically in coffee houses, especially the Meat Market, an establishment that exists (or used to exist) in an old butcher shop on 24th Street in San Francisco’s Noe Valley, where at least 80 percent of the text was crafted? How much of its form, for me, also is involved with living in a collective household on California Street in San Francisco, and with my various roommates there, a particularly intense & close household? I began the poem while working on the other sections of The Age of Huts – the first of which is Ketjak, published separately from the Roof Press edition – but did not complete it until I was well into the writing of Tjanting, another work that required rigorous planning and a careful structure laying out which sentence went where (and which also, taking directly from 2197, almost always involved revision as essential to the reiterative process).
You can get a better sense of how 2197 is put together if you follow a single term throughout the work, for example “lion.” Thus in the first poem, “I am Marion Delgado,” we find two consecutive sentences with it:
Lion I’d bites.
A specific lion, mane, bites for the peach-headed.
In “I Meet Osip Brik,” we find
The lion is full of grapes.
In “Rhizome,” lion & grapes again appear, but a different sequence:
Lion made the grapes
of my peach-headed man.
In “Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap,” we come across the combination again:
Anything lion do is made for many grapes.
And so on. My idea in writing this was that it should work on several levels. Whether or not it does, I guess, will depend both on what different readers experience coming across these individual sentences in very dissimilar (or what I hoped were dissimilar) contexts and on how well I may have executed my initial impulse(s).
My own sense is that form in the poem is all of these things – that one cannot dissociate exoskeletal structure (the “patterns of deployment” in 2197 are an alternating sequence of three different formats – a “one sentence / one line” mode with heavily indented lines that I took directly from work Barrett Watten was doing at the time, a prose poem paragraph, and a “stepped line” derived partly from the late work of William Carlos Williams & partly from Mayakovsky) from the actual processes of writing. Attempts to do so always strike me as artificial distinctions, which can be tactically useful, but quickly become sterile if carried out toward “logical conclusions.”
Another way to examine the same question would be to ask what the formal relationship of my titles to the textual bodies beneath them might be. 2197 is really where I think I worked out my sense of the modularity of that process. Each title in the sequence is exemplary (at least in my imagination) of a certain genre of title. Thus “I am Marion Delgado” is at one level a typical “autobiographical title,” and yet I am obviously not Marion Delgado, nor does the sentence mean precisely what it suggests. It was the “code” phrase used by Mark Rudd as he got up to the podium to speak to signal to the other members of what became the Weather Underground that it was time to bolt the SDS convention in 1969. Marion Delgado was, in 1968, a three-year-old toddler in the Fresno area who inadvertently left a tricycle on some railroad tracks and derailed a shipment of war material bound for Vietnam. Similarly, “I Meet Osip Brik” – a more active variant of the autobiographical title – suggests a history that I do not have (I am not, for example, Mayakovsky & while I have stood outside Brik’s apartment in what was then Leningrad, I never met the man who died some 18 months before I was born). “Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap” is a scenic title derived from the history of painting – I think of it as being particularly Ashbery-esque. Alternately, “Invasion of the Stalinoids” has a sci-fi feel to it, although “Stalinoids” is a term derived very much from the left in-fighting of the far left in the 1970s. “Turk Street News” was the name a porn theater where I once watched Kathy Acker on the big screen having sex with several men, one of whom was flogging her with a head of iceberg lettuce. So there seems always to be two things going on in these titles, for me at least, one of them being a relationship to title-ness, the other something that is far more personal & probably inscrutable to the reader. Neither, it is worth noting, has much to do with the mathematically determined sentences that appear as the “named body” beneath each title. Titles for me are very much about that arbitrary element that occurs in naming – what would become of a child if you named him Orlando or Arkadii instead of Jesse or Colin?
I recently had a fellow overseas who got very angry at me over just such a relationship between the title of one of the sections of VOG in The Alphabet and its textual body. He wanted there to be a clear referential frame between body & title where I want to explore as many angles in & around that relationship as is humanly conceivable. And he’d allowed the parsimony principle to convince himself that the body of the text had a single, nameable content, something that is virtually never the case with my work.
So where does form end & process begin, or form end & either “the world” or “content” begin? I’m not convinced that such boundaries are real, tho we can from time to time foreground elements that seem to suggest otherwise. In ”Revelator,” the first section of Universe – the work that comes after The Alphabet – I’m working with a five-word line as a constant & the physical size of a notebook as boundaries to the text. Yet if you were ask me what the formal engine of the text is, my instinct would be to point to the role of sound, rhythm and the levels of phrasal concentration that a line of that size literally dictates. Bob Perelman prefers a six-word line, and has said that he does so precisely because it doesn’t call for such concentration, which he sees as getting away from the looseness of speech & coming across as excessively literary. I don’t think that either one of us is “right” in which way to proceed, but we do at least understand the implications of making specific formal choices, so that I might do what’s right for me, Bob what is right for him.
