This is as close to the North Pole as this blog is going to get. Karri Kokko in Helsinki, Finland, ran a nice fat quotation from my blog last Monday in his weblog, commenting “Miten lie muilla, seuraavassa kuvaus siitä kuinka Ron Silliman kirjoittaa runoa. Muunneltavat muuntaen, siinä voisi olla puhe Poem in Reversestä.” To suggest that my Finnish is nowhere nearly as good as his English would be to pretend that I understood Finnish at all. The one time I found myself in Helsinki, in 1989, I negotiated entirely in English. Nor am I aware of any good Finnish-English translation program on the web. I am, however, bright enough to ask. So I did. He sent this reply which raises a further question worth asking.
Ron,
Nice of you to ask. It could translate into “I don’t know how other poets do it, but this is how Ron Silliman describes his method of writing poetry. Mutatis mutandis, he could be talking about Poem in Reverse.”
A few words, if I may, about Poem in Reverse. It’s a poem I started in September. I had a few premises. It’s going to be a long poem. I’m going to write it daily and I’m going write it in public view. There will be no preparation; I’ll just start to write and let’s see where it will take me. And finally, I will do it from the bottom up. The last point came up naturally; the medium set the form, so to speak. I thought, how I’m going to solve the blog problem – that every new entry comes on top and not the bottom as it normally is the case when writing? I thought, I’m not going to make it a problem; I’ll put all new material up front and not at the tail end of the poem.
I started out with one line. The next day I had three lines altogether. Soon the lines started to pile up. Themes occurred. Light, Paris, what a painting is: an oily mess / takes your breath away / represents fabric. Questions: What does it mean that the readers (who read the text starting from the top, of course) know something that I, the writer, doesn’t know yet (and vice versa). It soon became apparent that it doesn’t really matter which way you write, or read, a poem. It’s arbitrary and it’s a convention. It makes as much / as little sense as doing it the standard way. Most days I made it easy for myself – I left the text starting with a capital letter, so that I could start fresh and not be dependant of what was said the day before. But sometimes, just for the hell of it, I left the top line in mid-sentence. No problem. Nothing to it. Smooth riding all along. (We with the batch of 100-plus sentences always at the ready, never have trouble going on.)
It’s been easy because I gave myself the permission to do some light editing at the daily seams. Most days I’ll read (aloud) what I’ve written the past few days and I’ll make some slight revisions – I might cut a word or alter it, but there will be no cutting and pasting, or moving stuff around. That’s the one thing I’m committed to, and this will be the rule of edit when the writing is over. My original plan was to go on “for months”, well into next year, but I didn’t set a definite date. I thought, the poem will know when it’s done and ready. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed Febuary 3 is name day for Valo, which means “light” in Finnish, the one constant that’s been with us since day one. That could be the day. We’ll see.
And finally, Ron, do you know if this has been done before?
Regards,
Karri
Kokko’s poem looks fascinating – but again, I have no way of actually reading it, so all I can get are a crude rendition of the sounds & a vision of stanzaic & line values.
My answer to Karri was/is that I’m not aware of such a poem, although David Antin once suggested to me that he thought Tjanting and Ketjak might have been written that way. It’s an interesting prospect since “violating” time’s unidirectionality would seem to go right to the heart of poetry as a temporal medium. And while I’ve seen other poets use time as a conscious element of composition – Steve Benson has a series of pieces somewhere that each were written in the length of time it took for his computer to boot up – I’ve never seen anyone before Karri Kokko turn time on its head. Does anyone know if other such example exist?
