Read below this post for readings to be done for Wednesday, Week 2.
As is usually the case, our discussion about the role of form in writing experimentation, specifically contemporary poetry/prose, was just getting juicy when… class ended. A confession: sometimes I desire for us to keep talking after the proverbial bell has sounded, keep at it until we are all too tired or bored to discuss any further. However, I think that if we use the small amount of time we have in this small course of ours as a springboard, a starting point, a beginning, a teaser, then we won’t need to feel that our gratification is anything other than simply delayed. That is, how many of you really feel that Experiments In Text, or anything else you do, is separate from, rather than contiguous with, the rest of your lives?
To get on with the discussion: one of you raised a very good point about Retallack’s failure to mention (supposing we are taking her thought experiment as vaild, that creative writing practices can be likened to good scientific experiments) that part of a good (workable) experiment involves knowledge of a whole set of rules and procedures that have a long and tested history. Bacon and the “scientific method” was brought up as just this sort of procedural paradigm. We’re all familiar with its basic structure of hypothesis, controlled and independent variables, testing that hypothesis, with repeatability, verifiability of results, etc., as preconditions for the validity of the experiment. And true also that deductive and inductive scientific practices shift, even if slightly, from field to field, experiment to experiment, with each question about each different sort of phenomenon having its own sub-rules and procedures (physics and biology have different rules when it comes to experimental work, even if a common root, right?). So, the point was brought up that this analogy carries over to myriad fields and practices, not least of which, prose and poetry. The overall point, to paraphrase, seemed to be this: the idea of text arts-as-experiments breaks down when the rules and procedures of, say, poetry, seem to have vanished, given way to a kind of “anything goes” mentality about what counts as poetry, not to mention “good” poetry, etc. How can we perform an adequate experiment without any a) training in poetic/prosaic form? and b) without any (at least western) culture of valuing poetic/prosaic forms (certain metric forms were brought up as an example)?
To get at (a) very briefly: unfortunately (or fortunately?) this course is not a course about the history of poetic form. Though, the discussion almost makes me want to teach that course some day. But for (b): this is a rich challenge to anyone who writes today and also takes Retallack’s analogy as more than an analogy (like, say, me). I’d mention off the bat that the essay appeared in Jacket Magazine, the place all of us poetry geeks go to read excellent essays, translations, and collections of stuff on non-mainstream poetry. So, Retallack is writing to an audience who is supposed to know something about the history of poetic form. Of course, this is an imaginary world. I am willing to bet $13 that at least half of Jacket’s readership knows very little about the history, say, of the Descort.
Let me try to enter this discussion by agreeing with some of you who argued that it is untrue that we no longer learn about established forms in our writing classes, etc., but also by agreeing that we don’t do so, say, in the Oxford style. Like, we don’t cram for quizzes on definitions. By “we” I don’t just mean Evergreen, but I mean U.S. institutions generally. You’d be hardpressed to find such rigor in formal practices anywhere these days. So it is probably right to say that, as compared to other places and other times, we, as people who write stuff, are living in a comparatively pluralistic world. Or, to put it another way: as an editor of a journal that publishes a lot of new and established writers, I’ve found that it is very difficult to put one’s finger on what the trends are, what editors think they are looking for, formally, from writers, and what writers think they are doing in relation to one-another. I have some thoughts on why this is the case, but that is a different discussion. Suffice it to say that I think profound changes in patronage systems has a lot to do with the great diversity of writing we see now as compared to, say, even 50 years ago.
What I’m interested in addressing here is a bit more general. To go out on a limb: I think that it is difficult to discern what language games (to use Wittgenstein’s terms) we are playing while we are playing them. It is much easier to look back and say, “well, this period was marked by a shift away from the Elegiac Couplet to the Heroic Couplet, effectively ending three centuries of poetic tradition…” How cognizant were 17th century European readers of poetry that this paradigm shift was taking place? Most of the work we’ll be looking at in the coming weeks–prose, poetry, and essay–can (and has been) described as “hybrid,” or “mosaic” or “uncategorizable.” I prefer the term ”mosaic.” This is not just because some of the work uses multiple media or because other pieces consciously break from previous traditions, and in so doing, seem to float implacably. Rather, it is also because many of these works take established language games and mash them together, or erase some rules and keep others, etc., and in so doing are dissimilar enough from previous forms that we don’t yet have the vocabularies, the language, to describe them formally or otherwise. This is less about ”mind-blowing” work and more about the fact of new things, things that don’t ignore established forms, but play with them to the extent that they appear out of nowhere. I’d bet that most of us have had the experience when writing something, or making something in the world, of stepping back during or after the process and saying: “I have no idea what I just did.” T.S. Eliot (“Tradition and the Individual Talent”) argues that to get to this point, one needs ample training in intellectual history–otherwise your artistic gestures are reckless, probably meaningless, and probably uninteresting. But is this necessarily the case? What is your argument (seriously, I’m interested) against making something in your basement with only a vague sense of why, and from where the initial idea came? Waking up one morning and saying: “I’m going to write for an hour using only English words that lack any vowels”?
This question gets me to a last thought, for now, on matters of language, language games, form, etc. It seems to me that in prose, which I write and write poorly, as well as in poetry, which I write and write poorly, there are very rigid rule-structures, or, language games, at work. Perhaps the shift we sense is not one from form taking primacy, say, to anything goes, but rather is a consequence of 2 rather recent changes in emphasis (among many others): 1) what counts as “text” has shifted from “that which is written on the page” to include many other things: the context of the written, the page itself, the syntactic structures embedded within a line, the response the reader has to the work, etc. These, it can (and has) been argued, are all formal structures to be played with. And 2) an increasing emphasis away from “product” and towards “process.” How the work is made, what the work’s initial conditions are, how the work interacts with orthogonal or larger social structures in real time–these process-oriented matters are taken now by many western writers to be as important, if not more so, than an end result. The end result being, in some cases, a questioning of whether there ever is, as in some lines of scientific inquiry, an “end result.” I’m curious about what you think.
Let’s dicuss these questions further, here on the blog if you so choose, but also in your own work, in the classroom, and with the readings. In fact, this week’s readings might be a nice case-study in whether or not you think certain meta-structures–context, process, etc.–are “formal devices,” so to speak, that can or have taken the place of past structures, such as meter or traditional plot and character development through the paragraph-dialog-paragraph mode we’ve seen in a great deal of fiction writing. If so, do these hybrid or mosaic works work for you? What do they do? What are they up to? As we’ll see, the Situationists had, for a brief time, a fractured, though comparatively good handle on what they hoped to do. This is where the politics of form, or, less specifically, the politics of writing (or the writing of politics) comes into play. Why is it that we sometimes try to radically shift the way in which we make text? Out of boredom? For sociopolitical reasons? For fun? All of the above? And why are so many of these paradigm shifts, such as in Dada and Situationism, accompanied by “movements” or “collectives”? This, finally, was another question/set of comments that came out of Saturday’s workshops.
Reminder: please bring your creative work (if you have any yet) to Saturday’s class. In the meantime, email me with answers to these questions: 1) Do you have something (prose, poetry, etc) you want to work on in this course, and if so, what? (If not, let’s meet and brainstorm). 2) Would you be willing to share this work, towards the end of the quarter, by either publishing it someplace, sharing it with your fellow ET colleagues, and/or via a end-of-quarter reading? If unsure about (2), that’s okay–I just want us thinking about this sooner rather than later.
READINGS FOR WEDNESDAY:
Situationist International Journal #1: http://libcom.org/library/internationale-situationiste-1-article-6
“Theory of the Derive,” Guy Debord: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/all/display/314
“Robert Frank Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” from The Bowery Project, Brenda Coultas: