Stan Brakhage – Still from The Text of Light, 1974 (Collection MoMA)
Another question from Mark Tursi:
I agree that the word “stream,” even if disjointed and 'restless'hasn’t ever been adequate enough to characterize consciousness. This is perhaps one of the defining characteristics of so-called Postmodernism; i.e. a celebration, or, at least, a manifestation, of this instability. Your characterization of Ketjak (finding a form to break from the habits of continuity) seems a great example of this. But, my question is itself a bit discontinuous. And, that is, your mention of Brakhage, albeit brief, piqued my interest, especially in relation to your own work and these notions of consciousness. As you note about your memory of Morris, my memory of many Brakhage films (and I’ve seen a lot!) is often not an image – especially in terms of the hand painted films. In a sense, it is almost impossible to recall one of these Brakhage panels, because they seem hell-bent on resisting just that. So, what we’re left with is a feeling or a disquiet or an unease or even elation at times. I find this similar to reading Ketjak (or Tjanting and much – but not all – of your other work for that matter). That is, I find it hard to remember specific images, passages, or even ‘chunks of language.’ This could be my own memory lapse, but really (and I find this true of Stein’s Tender Buttons and Stanzas in Meditation too), it seems the altercation in consciousness and perception is what sticks most. That is, it’s not the language or the ‘signs’ as it were – it’s the feeling I’ve had after reading the complete text and then days later (sometimes weeks). So the question here is, would you agree with this comparison to Brakhage? That is, is there a similar intention towards a kind of reconfiguration or altercation of consciousness in some of your work that resists, as Derrida might say, leaving ‘traces’? And, question two: Brakhage characterizes his own practice in this way: “I want to leave something like a snail’s trail in the moonlight.”¹ How would you characterize yours?
I’m duly impressed when a poet – whether it’s Jane Miller or Ivan Zhdanov – can just shut their eyes and recite great quantities of their poetry. I’m lucky to be able to recall a few lines here, a few lines there, mostly the passages at the very beginning of a work or something that foregrounds a sound element, rather than an image or expository track. Still, there are people who come up to me to ask about the “exploding honey” passage of What or the “septic shock” passage of Xing, and I realize that they’ve held onto those moments as if they had been short stories plunked mysteriously into an otherwise poetic text.
That’s a hard comparison for me to make. For one thing, I tend to read my own poems only when I’m writing them, when I’m preparing for a reading, or when I’m in the midst of the painful process of proofing a book. There are readers out there who appear to have spent considerably more time reading my poetry than I have. When I’m in the midst of writing the poem, it proceeds in my head in a process that I can only characterize as extremely sensuous – in a work such as Zyxt, I tend to have at any given moment somewhere between 100 to 150 sentences that I’ve “collected,” whether through crafting them on my own, overhearing (including mishearing) others talking, appropriated language from all sorts of sources. I can, in my own head, hear where the poem is going, it’s almost as though I were listening to music. Not in any traditional instrumentation but through the language itself, as sound & as signification. When I come to the point where I’ve last stopped writing I literally look through my current collection of gathered materials to see if something there is what I hear as next. If it is, I insert it. If not, I’m apt to craft a new sentence that fulfills whatever demand I’m hearing. If I have something that is maybe half-right, I’m apt to rewrite it to “fit.” But I don’t think I could ever tell anyone – even myself – what that intuited, ongoing score might be. It’s clearly there in advance of the words, but not necessarily in a fixed form. Rather, I’m very aware that, of my usual batch of 100-plus sentences to chose from, there might be as many as four or five that might somehow fit, represent a possible next moment, although each would instantly transform into a new stroke or beat that would then set up whatever would then come after that. The experience I expect might not be so very different from what some non-writers get out of surfing or snow-boarding, that constant sense of having to shape motion while in motion.
I always try to practice my readings out before I give them, maybe once to go over whatever selection I’m making, then a second time to get the timing & phrasings down. I almost always have to have the house to myself to do this, far more so than in the writing process itself. I sequester myself in my study, which is an L-shaped finished basement lined with bookcase, my two computer desks (one for the job computer, the second my own system), a large table that is covered with various stacks of paper (as is a couch I have down there). I can be very loud & overly flamboyant when practicing my readings because I’m trying to overstress the phrasing elements I feel I have to get right, so that I’ll remember them later in front of an audience. If I’m making good choices & the practice is going well, it can come very close to my original experience of the music of the poem. And if it’s not, it’s really profoundly horribly not – and then I have to stop and rethink what I’m doing & start again almost from scratch.
I don’t have this experience proofing a book – that process is so full of stops & starts that it’s impossible – and I’ve only occasionally it experienced when actually reading to an audience. The closest I get to it in front of a crowd is in the sense of hyperventilated exhaustion I have at the end of a reading – that’s a familiar, very comfortable feeling. Whenever I’m involved in any of these activities, there must be a lot of endorphins flying, more or less literally.
Is this an “reconfiguration or altercation of consciousness”? I think that it must really depend on the meaning you give to those words. Certainly it’s all about the shape of consciousness at some level, but the level of ongoing motion within the poem, literally its inertia, can be so very powerful that I often feel rather as if I’m holding on for dear life.
Where Brakhage, say, or any of the two or three generations of film-makers who learned from him, from Warren Sonbert to Abigail Child and Henry Hills, comes into this is that Brakhage understood the narrative organization of film better than anyone, as the unfolding of meaning in time. If I make a musical analogy above, it’s because this is how I can best understand the process, but it is every bit the same narrative rush that one gets in film that is constantly reorganizing itself, reinventing itself literally frame by frame. Time is very much at the heart of all these processes. That may be why so many poets responded, say, to the work of Jackson Pollock when it first became widely known in the 1950s – his drip & splash method is so close to that very act of riding time in the painting that you can see it & feel it even in the static residue of a canvas a half century later. There’s that “snail’s trace in the moonlight,” it’s in every stroke.
¹ Brakhage, Stan. Chicago Review. September 2001.
