Setting
I write this post from home. I wonder if you can feel the difference – the “rule” of this blog is “blogging done @ work”. What that means is fluorescent lights, the small, even intimate noises of others working around me, a cubicle, the great emotional void of ‘office’, my own sense of paranoia around blogging as ‘not work’ and all the associated narratives I bind my worker self around. Friends, it means alienated labor in a tough market, fair and simple. If not straight.
At home, maybe 25 feet from my bed, 15 from the fridge, 5 from the couch, without coworkers walking by or a sense that I ought to be doing something else, or even the complicated background hum of alienated productivity (does D’Arcy
want to address this irregularity of access ramp heights? is it Patrick’s
desire to restructure the Intranet search engine? do i
want to resume updating this off-site archives database?), I can write from a different origin. I can quickly muddy it, I can bring the office home, but these complication sit differently, they fade more readily, I am more comfortable here, I return.
Site-specific blogging. Even when the posts do their best to ignore and block out the work environment surrounding them. A good deal of my (writing) work is all about magnifying palpable incoherencies, bringing buried logics into the open anyway – with all the attendant cobwebs and obsessive repetitions and shadowy unsaids.
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Methodbioautography, my current project, is a simultaneous, jump-cut working-through of four old notebooks of the kind I tend to ignore/suppress. Each notebook has a different cover, but is of the same size and shape. Ragged right stanzas are born of words and phrases lifted from page 1 of each notebook in turn, then page 2, etc. But the order itself becomes uneven and varying, as some notebooks are written on back and front, some front only, and, occasionally, a whole page is left blank. So what begins as a quartet fades, like the players in
Yellow Submarine getting zapped by the Blue Meanies, down to trio, duet, and finally, solo. Surrounding this, the first and last “chapters” of
bioautography are more generous, free movements; free as in wide-ranging, also, inviting the delight of chance, of choice. The stanzas here proceed, in turn, through fragments taken from “at random” (meaning I flipped…) each entire notebook: this introduces the thematic and specific referents, and works to open and close the space in which the main sequence unfolds.
What is this? Forcing a hidden, unloved/overlooked language into the open, offering the background hum of my own writing practice up, and, through attending to it, through angry and compassionate exam, transmuting these private thoughts, occasional observations, and predictable tangents into a strangely intense Frankenstein monster, dense with fraught rhythms, a sort of motorik stutter, marrying insistent pounding to a omnivorous, atmospheric drift. A twilight sonanta of contemporary alienation.
The Steely Dan Project, my previous darling, simultaneously demolished and reconstructed Danielle Steel’s
The Ghost, using the very word ash and busted rhetorical bricks I found on a given, randomly chosen page. To mix things up a little, and extend this reworking into a different domain, these new page-poems are then infused with a selection of words drawn from Steely Dan song titles. Its deeply irreverent, yet the pull of Danielle’s and Steely Dan’s work (in that order), of the worlds they invite/invoke is referenced, inescapably, through their material – words – via the imposed limit of only this found language. So the miraculous tension of sampling, of source, of pulling apart the field to watch it come together, different, yet related, again. Lovely, lovely mutation.
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Poetics
In both projects, the work is that of the collector-alchemist. The writing agency is a process of selecting, tweaking, and presenting already worked material. Who works that material, whether a previous me, or a previous other, is a relevant if limited – but not limiting – distinction. What’s at heart is the sort of flavor the source provides – as in cooking – what ingredients, and how fresh? If Steely Dan makes the obvious other of Danielle Steel’s text (and its attendant ideologies) strange to itself, then, with
bioautography, it was my hope to return the favor, to take work that felt like a product of my (uncomfortably not ready for prime time) fixed ego – and render that other up raw, unfixed, compelling, strange and, finally, free.
My process here is an un/refixing, but not simply to delight in un/refixing itself – though that is a constant and necessary companion. I go there because there’s life in it – as a reader of these texts I am awoken to their possibilities, to their inherent instabilities and stabilities, to their myriad weird gestures and manipulations, to all their veins of word-ore. So I’m a miner, and also the metalworker, and also the mountain (whether I admit it or not). There’s magic there, juice, jizz, sweet wine, a plate full of dim sum dumplings. The heat goes up, friction is applied, the whole Universe present – good stuff.
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Further SetI’m mulling this after a morning of Pu-erh tea, Lisa Jarnot’s
Black Dog Songs, and the poems of Jim Gore. Got to asking myself what poetry is, what I’m reading here, and, for once, instead of going ballistic on someone else’s text, decided to take a (over)look at my own process (well, do I write poetry? how is my work part of this? what IS this stuff?), which (and raise your little cyber hand if you feel this) feels horribly and absolutely mysterious to me – that is – I arrive before it at a loss for words. Which is both absurd and all right. But today, I thought I’d venture in to that cave a little bit. Whether I let my eyes adjust to the darkness or blasted it a-bright with some REI lantern,
is a rhetorical question addressed to Nobody in Particular. NiP, hope to hear from you soon. JWG, hope to have a response for you later today.
