Moby Dick, Twitterized

Tweet, Tweet, Moby Dick.

1 chapter=2 tweets (1 poem-ized, 1 satirized. Lyrical/satirical. And so on)

Extracts:

1. Allusions to poets with eyes full of whales. The wounded shore, the creation of their names, the elements of bloody song.

2.

Chapter 1- Loomings

You know you’ve made it to the big leagues when you have a cancelled NBC television series made from your novel

Footnoted

An excerpt from a piece in progress:

I ought to do something, she thinks, it’s two in the afternoon.  Days off work make her uneasy. Too much time. She checks her email [1] twice in four minutes. Closes the computer. [2]  Opens it. Checks three news sites. Another celebrity has died.[3] They suspect drug overdose.[4] They suspect suicide.[5] They suspect the doctor, of course. [6] Don’t do drugs, they say. Fame is so tragic, they say. Fame, they say, does funny things. Foreign leader eyes losses at the polls. [7] Foreign killer is killed with stones.[8] Local leader denies allegations of sticking his dick where it doesn’t belong.[9] Small child lost, found. Child pushed to ground in assault. [10] Olsen twins sign garments for gaggles of fans.[11] German ships blaze arctic trail.[12] The day displayed in pictures for those to whom reading words becomes tiresome or dull.[13] Closes the computer. Walks to kitchen. Opens refrigerator. Closes it. Opens cupboards. Closes them. Pulls five outfits off of hangers, sucks in belly, hard, tosses five outfits to the floor. Pokes at thighs. Pulls at the thigh-skin. Slaps thighs. Pushes belly out and curves the back, resting her hands on the distention saying to the mirror “just entering my third month.”[14] Deflates. Examines the belly, the sad little breasts, the fat thighs from all angles. Picks out a loose dress and a thin sweater. She sits, cross-legged before the full-length mirror and coats her lashes with dark goop, separates hairs with a toothpick and brushes color onto her cheeks. Sucks in her cheeks to see what she’d look like if she were thin. Tries three shades of purple, pink and red on her puckered lips. She sits in her car and the vinyl seat cover adheres to the backs of her legs. She sits in the driveway, starts the ignition. Shuts it off. Starts the ignition. Stares at the back of the house. Tunes the digital dial to a radio show, Carl Castle re-creates the weeks news,[15] and she listens for ten minutes in the driveway. The audience laughs, claps. I’ll go to a coffee shop [16], she thinks. I’ll read. She lights a cigarette and drives to the end of the street. What’s the point? she thinks. It seems too complicated, too involved. At the end of the block, she turns the car around and pulls back into the driveway. Shuts off the engine. Listens to the rest of the radio show. Goes inside to poke at her face, pinch her thighs, change into a pair of sweatpants and check her email.

Notes:

1. E-mail, a form of exchanging communication via electronic messaging, originated in its most primitive forms in the 1960’s and was popularized in the 1980’s.
2. Author is referring to opening and closing a laptop computer, an adaptation from the original desk-top computer. The laptop featured a screen that folded down onto the keyboard to close.
3. When this piece was written (2009), a number of prominent celebrities had recently passed away. Michael Jackson, a pop star,  and Farrah Fawcett, an actress, both died June 25, 2009, Fawcett of anal cancer and Jackson of what was later revealed to be a drug overdose. Other notable celebrity deaths during the time of authorship include Patrick Swayze, an American actor (pancreatic cancer), Senator Ted Kennedy (youngest brother of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.), Merce Cunningham (choreographer, general creative genius), Billy Mays (oddly famous for his incessant appearances in irritating infomercials), among others.
4. Referring both to Michal Jackson’s known prescription drug abuse and the roll pharmaceuticals played in his death, and also to the general abuse of drugs by celebrity figures, which had played a role in other recent celebrity deaths such as those of Heath Ledger (actor) and Anna Nicole Smith (sex icon).
5. At the time of both Michal Jackson’s and Heath Ledger’s deaths there was speculation that the drug overdoses may have been self-induced and intentional.
6. Jackson’s death was, ultimately, ruled a homicide, and his doctor held responsible for irresponsible and deadly cocktails of drugs.
7. On June 12, 2009, Iraq held their presidential elections, and the following day protests erupted with accusations of electoral fraud, and citizens poured out in support of their unsuccessful presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi (who lost the election under very suspicious circumstances. This was all a very complicated international/political issue, and tempers were generally running high anyway, especially with all the unpleasant business between the US and the new democracy thing.).
8. The author read this, while looking through news sites at the time she was writing it, as a blurbed headline on the browsers “today’s headlines” drop-down menu and found it disturbingly blunt. She cannot, now, find the original headline or article again, and honestly probably never did actually read the article in its entirety, and just used the headline for this piece.
9. Referencing the commotion over South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s extramarital affair with an Argentinean woman, which he later admitted to. To be fair, this could just as easily have been referring to Gov. Jim Gibbons’ denial of cheating on his spouse with a mother of seven in Reno, Nevada, or assemblyman Mike Duvall, who resigned after being caught on tape boasting about his sexual conquests and then swore up and down that he’d never had an affair, or any number of other politicians who were caught with their pants down in rest-stop bathrooms or their own Oval Offices.
10. She just made these up. But, to be fair, these things probably did happen somewhere, at some time.
11. The Olsen Twins were unbelievably rich and famous, for some reason, and nobody can quite fathom why.  To the best of anybody’s understanding, they landed a role on a television series in their infancy (Full House), despite bearing an unwitting resemblance to a troll, and then proceeded to market and sell poor-quality home video-style movies of themselves, which made them their first few million dollars. After this initial, young success, the twins were famous for a) being twins b) being adorable, and doubly so because, well, they’re twins! c) putting their names on clothing other people designed d) having drug/alcohol abuse issues and/or eating disorders.
12. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8251914.stm?lsf That’s true. They really did that. See? Germany’s good for something.
13. The BBC online news site offers a page called “The Day in Pictures”, where breaking news is documented visually, or else they just post impressive pictures of cute things like bears taking baths (this is true. I am not making this up)
14. This image is of the author describing a bit of body image distortion, convinced that her stomach is large enough, when intentionally pushed out, to appear as though she is in her third month of pregnancy.
15. The author  means Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, a comedic  News Show broadcast weekly on National Public Radio (NPR), hosted by news anchor Carl Kasell.
16. By “coffee shop”, the author really meant “Stella’s”, her favorite coffee shop in Denver where she sat to read, write, smoke, and socialize just about every day she lived in the city over this summer. But because “Stella’s” is far too specific to be recognized by readers, she generalized, here.

I declare Myself the King of Many shiny Things, and build a Shelf

Transform a passage from Augusten Burroughs’ memoir, Running With Scissors into a Defoe-esque passage a la Robinson Crusoe.

Original:

My shiny bookshelves are lined with treasures. Empty cans, their labels removed, their ribbed steel skins polished with silver polish. I wish they were gold. I have rings, there, rings from our trip to Mexico when I was five. Also on the shelves: pictures of jewelry cut out from magazines, glued to cardboard and propped upright; one of the good spoons from the sterling silver my grandmother sent my parents when they were married; silver my mother hates (“god-awful tacky”) and a small collection of nickels, dimes, and quarters, each of which has been boiled and polished with silver polish while watching Donnie and Marie or Tony Orlando and Dawn.

Defoe-ized:

On the 19th day of August I Gathered wood from Pine and Walnut and palm trees, which grew beside one another in the same valley, somehow, and I first shot at these trees with my rifle, having accrued copius amounts of powder, simply to exert and establish my position as infallable Ruler over this congregation of trees in this, My forest, which I own and rule, being both Human and Man, and therefore inherintly god-like, and the shooting of the trees also served the additional purpose of excecuting the various species of living creatures which resided among their branches, some of which were, upon closer examination, fit for my consumption, while others were simply inconvenient to me in that they inhaled oxygen that would have been useful to me, in my daily exercises of inhalation, and therefore these other breathing creatures were bothersome and perhaps detrimental to my own survival, being, as I am, in dire need of air to breathe, and yet other creatures which I shot at with my rifle and powder were simply excellent target practice, and there for my disposal, and therefore I disposed of them, while the Koala bear I discovered I brought home to my Grand Castle of mud and Sticks and I trained him, with my impressive talent for training Ignorant animals,  to bow down before me and recognize me as his One true Lord.

August the 20th I questioned the will of God, prayed, and cut down aforementioned trees before realising, to my great distress, that I had no way of hauling them to the place where I intended to produce shelves from their wood, and so I forgot about them for about twelve years.

I made Me shelves from this Wood which I Hauled bodily, MySelf, and thanked God for this acquisition Of Shelves, upon which I placed Many and Various varieties of Objects, all of Which embodied a Glimmering and Shining quality, which Pleased me.  I fired my Rifle at a Tin can, removing its Label and revealing its Shiny silver Hue, and plac’d this Can upon My new Shelf, and though this Can was Pleasant to My Eye, I believ’d God to be punishing Me for all the previous Sins of my Past, the wrongs Of my Horrid Childhood and indecent Thoughts, that this Can should be of a Silver color and not a More regal, Gold hue befitting the Regal master of the Universe, such that I Am.

A ring, a round, Ring sits upon these regal shelves, the likes of Which I acquired Upon a voyage to the Treacherous Seas of Mexico in my Youth, at the age of Five, and beside it is Propped images, Pillaged by Me from Native peoples who Sin and Covet the goods of Others from the Sinful magazines which infiltrate the Minds of Loathesome society–Oh, Grateful, glorious God who has deliver’d me Out of this Woeful world of Society and Into an Isolation where I may rule Quietly and peacefully Over my Subjects of Shiny, inanimate Objects.

My mother Warned me, in the Waning days of my Sinful Youth, of the various harmful Qualities of the Silver spoon which I place Upon this Shelf, built, as I have said Before, of Wood cut by Myself, which I constructed, and spoke of the poor, Inferior Qualities of said Spoon of Silver, and beside this Spoon I place a Humble collection of Currency, taken by Me from Other, lesser Humans, in whom I instilled the Wrath of God before Taking of them Their shiny, round Coins.  These coins were Polished by Me with the Utmost Care, in boiling water Which I carried five Days from a Stream in a Pot, built with master Ingenuity, with much Trial and Error, before I Mastered the Art of Pot-making, and in This Self-made Pot I boiled the many coins until they Shone and Sparkled to my Pleasing, and Having done so I declared my Self wealthy, and a King. Of everything.

Things Gary Fincke has said

This is mostly for you, Ally. I know you miss him erry day.

Notes taken in Non-Fiction, Spring 2009:

“Fiction is enormously more popular than poetry. If you want to make money I suggest you stop using line breaks. NOW.”

“We were sputnic children. We had to beat the Russians”

“I spent all of Chemistry staring at that bombshell Diane Perino, wishing I could touch her…….yeah.”

“You guys all remember those road trips you’d take with your family. We had three kids, you know, so one of them would always be squished in the middle of the back seat. And when they’d start making a ruckus, whoever was sititng in the middle would always get the Claw, you know, when I’d reach back with one arm from where I was driving and just grab at their knee.  And then my daughter. Yeah. She used to get car sick. We’d go out for pancakes before we started driving, and twenty minutes into it she’d get carsick and we’d have to pull over so she could get sick. And at first, you know, you feel sorry for her. But after a couple of times I was just thinking, Jesus, throw up out the Goddamn WINDOW.”

“Hey Gary! You really gave it to Sarah Palin again last night, didn’t you?” – His neighbors  (I wish I wish I could remember the context of this quote, but can’t)

“People say things in memoir like, “I remember when I was in diapers.” No you don’t! …or else you’re a slow learner.”

“I’ve never seen a PowerPoint presentation that was helpful in any way.”

“Get out of there, Gary, you big pantywaste.”  -his childhood teacher

“My friend’s mom buttered the sandwich. Both sides. Who does that?”

“Have you ever been to one of those small town circuses? God those things are depressing. It looks like the camel might die before the end of the show.  ….yeah”

“It was such an awful carnival they couldn’t even find a midget.”

(During a reading and Q&A session with two job candidates applying for positions in the Creative Writing department. A husband and wife team applying as one)  “So, two writers under one roof. How does that even work? Sometimes that can be fabulous, and sometimes that just leads to alcohol and prescription drugs”

“If somebody was seriously ill when they were watching that I think they’d want to get a flame thrower out!” -on “The Bucket List”

“Okay, so, who doesn’t want to know more concrete details about time in this piece?  …Nadia’s probably going to raise her hand over there and say ‘oh, what is time? We can’t restrain ourselves with such flighty concepts as time.’ “  (ooh, ouch. But awesome)

“That woman with octuplets. Somebody oughta just take her out back and punch her in the throat.”

“Donny’s excuse for not coming to class today was actually pretty good. He told me his landlord didn’t tell him they were doing construction, so when he woke, he was missing a flight of stairs. Huh. I almost want to give him credit for being here. That was some of his better writing”

Quotes from Bob Shacochis:

On bad writers: “Why don’t you give yourself permission to shut the fuck up?”

On the “write as though everybody you know is dead” advice: “No. Write as though everybody you know is alive and well and will read this essay. Even your worst enemies”

“Fuck catharsis. It won’t produce good art”

“My mother died eating a can of peaches. We looked for a place to bury her, couldn’t find one, and so we threw her out the side of a plane. There. That’s my story”

“A mentor I had in my graduate program said to me, ‘Bob, I sense you’re not ready to die for poetry.’  I looked at him and said ‘…you’re right. And I’m never going to write a fucking poem again.’  And I haven’t.”

“There are not many good prose writers who don’t love poetry. I think poetry is the greatest and truest art form. It is so hard to do it right, and so easy to do it wrong.”

“Heelocopter”  (about 50 times)

Looking forward when I should be staring at a screen. A computer screen. And writing scholarly things.

Creating a website for a final project in History of the Book to demonstrate hyperlink medium and its influence on the processes of the mind and the writing process. I’m thinking of hyperlinking poetry with associative texts, images, sounds, video etc.

http://comenius.susqu.edu/ENGL/390/09SP-01/waggener/Poem%20Home.html

Also–- pretty excited about courses next semester.

Black Feminism I (part 1 of a 2 semester course tought by the fierce and, let’s face it, slightly terrifying Dr. Hill. Becky, Berkeley, Claire, Kaitlyn and I think Kelly are all registered too, so, basically a feminist force of goodness)

Forms of Literature: The Novel debated for a long time between this and Forms: Short Story. Ultimately decided on the Novel course because, looking at both of the sylibi, the Novel class covers more new material, whereas I’ve read and studied most of the short stories on the agenda. Also Dr. Robertson is one of my favorite humans ever, and is just too wonderful not to take one more class with before I graduate.

Grammar: Alas, I missed the reign of the infamous Dr. Harden, but rumor is that one of the new writing professors, either Catherine or Silas will be stepping up, so I’m intrigued.

Women’s Studies:hopefully this will fall post-internship. I’m extremely proud of Liz, too (as are Becky, Berk, and the entirety of WomenSpeak, I’m sure) for signing up for this class as well. We’ll make a feminist of you yet.

Senior Writing Portfolio: = applying to graduate schools=anxiety attack

Independent Writing: Probs with G. Fincke, maybe with Glen?

milk jugs

Denver Art Museum

Here’s a great video from MOMA that I saw last year when K. Wats and I were at AWP NYC. Reminded me of a neat video installation I saw at the Denver Museum, but this one might take the cake:

Creative Criticism

In academia, as in the professional world, there is an understandable rift, a division between those who write creatively, and those who analyze critically.  At a university we categorize these into the Writing majors and English majors, or, those who write versus those who read.  This separation seems as natural a dichotomous relationship as producer/consumer, film director/film critic,  visual artist/ gallery frequenter, chef/diner.  Whereas one creates, the other tests the machinery, the bearings, the quality, and produces opinions as to its usefulness, its beauty, or its craft.  There seems to be the assumption, too, that while the writer dwells in the right hemisphere of the brain, given to fancies and intensely emotive dreams; the reader/critic remains cooly objective, inhabiting the rational left-brain, making analytical notations and rational observations.
But reducing these schools into two separate divisions: writer and critic, draws the assumption that these two do not exist simultaneously, cannot inhabit the same skull or body. One is either creative or analytical. Either a writer or a reader. Either subjective or objective.  We are using the correlative “either/or”, and overlooking the all powerful co-ordinating conjunction, “and”.  Here, in the speculative field of this written investigation,  we will combine the terms “critic”, or “analyst”, with the term “ creative writer” to form a new player in the field of literary criticism: the Creative Critic.
Because I consider myself a writer, one of those flighty, imaginative, groundless dreamers, I entered the realm of literary criticism with a cinching feeling of anxiety and foreboding.  Here we were, writers and burgeoning critics combined in an academic test tube (classroom), learning the finesse of literary criticism. Violent sounding terms like deconstruction, and the death of the author fly across tongues, we speak of suicidal poetry, Freudian desires to kill our predecessors. Freud speaks of the creative writer as a child, acting out fantasies and daydreams through the pen.  These often clinical ways of discussing literature can, to the author, seem at times quite blasphemous, and being in the classroom feels, at times, as though you’ve infiltrated the other party’s secret meetings. Like a skilled and impassioned seamstress who has stumbled into a room filled with people pulling threads apart from the seams to inspect the spacing of each stitch; discussing what it means that violet sleeves were sewn adjacent to a lavender bodice (“Were these two shades of purple a symbolic statement about the gradations of social injustice in Latin America?” ponders one. “No, no,” interjects another, “the seamstress clearly has repressed childhood memories of her purple bedroom and has subconsciously displaced this anxiety into the selection of her fabric palate, it’s brilliantly Freudian.”); debating which precise skirt-to-cardigan ratio produces the highest degree of aesthetic beauty; another group chimes in that the whole notion of the skirt is just a residual manifestation of the ideals of the dominant patriarchal social structure, total marxist propaganda. The seamstress is, understandably, perplexed. This is how her creation is judged, used and viewed?  This was not at all what she’d had in mind.
As the comparable the seamstress in the room, I began to wonder and to investigate how a critic might read literature differently than a creative writer, how they might read similarly, and how each might learn from the other. As a creative writer, it is absolutely eye-opening and, I believe ultimately helpful, to cross into the analytical spectrum and witness how literature is dissected after its birth. In workshops and peer reviews, fellow writers will critique and test the pliability of new work in similar ways, but the literary critic employs a broader and more penetrating analysis.  The writer can learn from this, asking him or herself how the work will be perceived, and noting where the critic is looking for meaning.  Knowing where the work will be judged and found wanting can help a writer become cognizant of these perceptions, and the writer may then choose to alter their forthcoming work accordingly (at the risk of selling out and losing his or her own voice in fear of prospective criticism, perhaps) or to simply listen in on the conversation the work inspires.
The critic, too, has much to learn from the writer. So often, the critic seems to have lost or forgotten his sense of exploration and wonder with the literary form.  Language in the raw and in all of its various arrangements in poetry, fiction, prose, even graffiti’d walls or instructional pamphlets carries all the possibility of the mind, it carries sound and rhythm like musical notation, it creates visual images, scenes, colors and texture like a painting, photograph or mosaic. How extraordinary for these unassuming letters, scratches of a pen or stamps of neat black ink on a clean page, to convey all five senses, and a mind’s worth of memories, they carry the power to build and destroy nations, friendships, to express any experience, emotion, to pass on information and record transaction.
And language, literature, does not exist behind a pane of glass, objects like vases to be scrutinized from a distance from different angles, but with that barrier between object and observer. As centuries of writers will attest, and as the many strings of intertextual works demonstrate, literature is constantly in conversation with itself, mutating through gradations of adaptation and translation of all different sorts. Herald Bloom spoke of this phenomenon in his essay “The Anxiety of Influence”, but as this text identifies the writer’s influence by other writers as a source of anxiety and unease, as a competitive one-upping of literary forefathers,  his interpretation of this is different from my own. I believe that reading other author’s work and engaging with it in thoughtful, meaningful ways––by writing in response to, writing through, reading with intentionality, using creative approaches to literary art––presents an opportunity to not only read in a more engaged and mindful way, but to also write, to join the conversation posed by the first authors and carry it forward.
Rather than viewing literature from behind the pane of metaphorical glass and reading from a purely analytical perspective, I propose that we, as writers and as connoisseurs, as literary critics, break the glass partition and touch the vase, turn it over and upside down, take the vase apart and lay the pieces before us to see the patterns they create on the tile, the beauty of their parts, and reassemble the pieces into something new: a bowl, maybe, or a mask, or a mosaic to be hung on living room walls.  The possibilities of the vase are limited only by the limitations of the mind and imagination.  But there is more to the exercise of disassembling the vase than making something new from the pieces. In taking apart the vase, we can also see how the vase was assembled in the first place. Computer technicians routinely build computers from scrap metal and take apart working machines as part of their education in learning how the object functions properly; bakers create pastries from the basal elements of flour, water, sugar, and the patron tastes only the warm, soft folds of dough, when all have been inextricably combined, and is able to tell nothing of the alchemy of baking.  In order to appreciate, or even fully understand that which we judge, it is helpful to gain respect and knowledge for the object or the process of creation. Some of the best NFL commentators are former players with an intimate knowledge of the experience on the field.  Some of the most interesting conversations about literature are being held among creative writers who are effective in part because they read as writers and as critics of their own and other’s work.
This proposal of a new way of engaging with imaginative work is not a suggestion to replace critical analysis, but as a way to supplement it. Of course there will always be judgment, declarative statements of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, of ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’, there will always be scholars ready to either kill the author or crown him master of the known universe. And these are useful voices, all deserving of attention, but also deserving of questioning and dissent. Why judge what you cannot create? Why not return a spirit of awe, playfulness and joy into the process of understanding and engaging with language? If we approach literary criticism with the understanding that its goal is to break into texts and withdraw meaning, or discover something about the author, the text itself, the reader, or society, let us also understand that the enigmatic nature of language can be handled and unfurled in new, creative, non-traditional ways.

reading backward/drawkcab gnidaer & Vanessa Place, La Medusa

La Medusa

Vanessa Place, fiction writer, poet, and co-founder of Les Figues Press from LA gave a reading in October, 2008, reading excerpts from her new mixed-genre novel, La Medusa. She wore all black and black hair and, I wrote later, is pretty much the fuckawesomest. And funny. When she laughs it sounds like she’s saying “yeah yeah yeah” back in her throat and it’s a real laugh, which is pretty wonderful. Conceptual artist=conceptual reading.  We, the audience, brought poems and readings that were “currently blowing our minds” and these exerpts were read inbetween the pages of La Medusa that she ripped from her copy of the book and handed to audience members to read aloud, “this way,” she said, “there will never be this exact same reading again.” Rare to find somebody (especially the successful artist type) so un-pretentious, so slightly ironic.  “Readings are awful. You all sit there, and I become the television, and I have no interest in becoming the television.”

She prefaced her reading of the very last page of the book: “Because it seems to be human nature to turn to the back page of a book first, before you even buy it, to see if you like it, I’ll begin by reading the last page of the novel. Backwards.”

Beautiful

am I.

Sentence the word the am I.
Beginning the in and end the in am I.
Dying in living and living in dying am I.
Other the am I. Others the.
Stars the
sees
she and
–– gone I’m,Casper I’m. Bomb the that’s––
says Lady our and, eyes her opens Feena and, onion peeled an as bright
pops moon the and tarwater as black
goes sky the and lift clouds the and something
for hard wishes and eyes her closes Feena, unexpectedly rain…

…why, Daddy why, we why…

…was it what recall don’t I though
,true it’s
significance some of something
said she, blue and pink wearing was she watching
was I, event any in, remember ally
-re don’t I, born was I day the, day this maybe, day one
try, her watched I though, true not that’s
,die mother my watched and Matthew murder to one that told I
light only and light in begat
am I
eyeless
the than terrible more nothing
is there and Narcissus and Medusa am I: confess I

At the end (or was it the beginning?) of the last, jarringly beautiful page of inverted, poetic text, Place paused. Took a breath. And read the same passage from beginning to end.  The contrast, the same words forming new images, inflections, connotations and meanings was startling.

I confess: I am Medusa and Narcissus and there is
nothing more terrible than the
eyeless
I am
begat in light and only light
I told that one to murder Matthew and watched my mother die,
that’s not true, though I watched her try,
one day, maybe this day, the day I as born, I don’t re-
ally remember, in any event, I was
watching she was wearing pink and blue, she said
something of significance
it’s true
though I don’t recall what it was…

…why we, why Daddy, why…

…tomorrow it’ll certainly
rain unexpectedly, Feena closes her eyes and wishes hard for
something and the clouds lift and the sky goes
black as tarwater and the moon pops
bright as a peeled onion, and Feena opens our eyes, and our Lady says
––That’s the bomb. I’m casper, I’m gone––
and she
sees
the stars.
The others. I am the others.
I am dying in living and living in dying.
I am in the end and in the beginning.
I am the word, the sentence.
I am

Beautiful.

There were two stories here. In fact, an entirely different narrative came alive in the first reading, and the way Vanessa read the words was poetic, halting and lovely as they caressed the unusual syntax, intermittently smoothing over and bumping the unfamiliar sounds of inverted lines, syntax. Meaning itself became peripheral and it became about the sounds of the words. There were moments of surprising clarity––combinations fantastically pleasing to the ear precisely because they were jarring, unexpected, because they fell outside predictable rhythms and conventions. At times it sounded like a different language.  The syntax becomes confused, nouns become verbs and the entire experience of being thrown from familiarity heightens the senses. Both reader and writer are aware in a new way.
Reading backward need not be only a frivolous aesthetic game, or simply a way to jolt the synapses. Juxtaposing the inverted reading with the straightforward reading demonstrates the impact each has on the other, and the effect of this contrast on the reader (and, similarly, on the writer acting as the reader of his or her own work). Hearing the words twice, in different combinations and inflections allows us to hear the variations in meaning, the implications of order and expectations (McGall, 10)
It was Emily Dickinson who wrote, in one of her undated journals,
“Did you ever read one of her poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have––a Something overtakes the Mind––” (prose fragment 30)
Dickinson describes an interaction with literature that speaks to the symbiotic relationship of the reader/critic and creator. She speaks of a physicality, a “plunge” that “overturned you” and of that “Something overtak[ing] the Mind.”
Creative interpretation or analysis need not necessarily be an act of writing a new text, but can also be achieved through intentional, involved and creative ways of reading. McGill and Samuels write, “Reading backward is a highly regulated method for disordering the senses of a text. It turns off the controls that organize the poetic system at some of its most general levels.  When we run the deformative program through a particular work we cannot predict the results.” (8)  It is precisely this unpredictable result achieved through such procedures that make them invaluable in the reading of literature and poetry.  In unfamiliar territories, we are more acutely aware of our surroundings, the sensory input of the situation. Such deformative procedures bring the reader/critic into a more intense degree of engagement with a text. No longer is the reader a passive observer, hypnotically accepting the words and their meanings as given and immutable, but an active scientist who kicks the tires of poetic structure, testing its give. The reader becomes a child, fascinated and attentive.

Do we lose something in the vacuum of predictability? When reading, too, becomes habitual and routine, we are swept in the centrifugal force of that which is expected, our eyes glaze over words, knowing and anticipating that adjective follows verb follows noun. Beginning, then middle, then end. There are patterns. We have spent a great deal of our lives mastering these patterns. So why shrug off linearity and safe predictability by learning new ways of reading? Why experiment with reading backwards, or vertically, from the middle out, reading only nouns or ignoring all but words beginning with vowels?
There is something akin to the child’s wonder at learning to read for the first time, the strain of combining words and discovering context and reason, in this exercise. Re-wire the synapses. If you’ve mastered the bicycle, take off a wheel. Write with your non-dominant hand. Draw faces in the mirror, or with your eyes closed. Walk backward on the path you know best; from your bed, to the desk, to the bathroom, to the office.  Hang pictures upside down and watch the landscapes evolve.
“Poems lose their vital force when they succumb to familiarization,” write McGann and Samuels, and is this, backward reading, not a strategy of estrangement? Read as though you’re learning a language for the first time, where each word is handled carefully, considered important. This is a performative exercise, but also an intellectual one. What would we learn if we turned the world or the word upside down? Down upside word, the or world, the turned we, if learn we would. What?

La Medusa is my ongoing “escape the world” book at the moment, the pre-falling asleep book, the sit-in-the-tub-and-read book, the book I won’t smoke a cigarette without, the one I’m savoring (it’s fragmented screenplay-esque quality lends itself to small portions.), the one I cannot stop underlining.  I’ll refrain from a full-out review (of sorts) until I’ve finished it, but urge you to pick it up and devour.

http://fc2.org/place/medusa/excerpt.htm

http://fc2.org/place/medusa/medusa.htm

also, les figues press   http://www.lesfigues.com/lfp/index.php

Unfolding the Cranes

2-D vs 3-D

Three views of the paper crane align vertically down the page, each photograph providing a different angle of the letters written neatly upon the creature’s paper skin.  Nowhere else in the book does the poet reveal the pattern of the lettering, nowhere does she decrypt or decode the bird’s poem.  When giving the pages a perfunctory glance or flipping through, the origami seems  an anomaly; three pages of shapes, folded animals stuck in the centerfolds of a conglomeration of words. Most readers may glance at the pictures, think something to themselves either about the poet’s ingenuity or craft, then will continue turning the page.
Oni Buchanan is a poet and author of two books of poetry: What Animal (2003) and Spring(2007). I met her at her poetry reading and class at Bucknell University . She spoke about her art:

Class: The origami pictures were pretty
Poet: They are poems
Class: But how can you read them?
Poet: What would you have to do to read them?
Class: (silence) I guess you’d have to unfold them
Poet: Right. And how are you going to unfold them?
Class: (silence) Would you make the origami yourself?
Poet: Right! Yes! And then?
Class: Write the letters on the bird the way it shows in the pictures?
Poet: Right! And then?
Class: And then you’d unfold it and read the poem
Poet: Exactly! My point with the origami poems was, in part, that as a reader, you only get a limited part of the poem, only the surface level of any text is available if you don’t engage with it, turn it over and touch it.  You have to be curious enough about the poems to take the effort to physically make the shape, copy down the writing, unfold it and read it.  But once you do that, it’s like you’ve found your own secret little hidden poem. It’s almost like you wrote it yourself, but in a language you didn’t quite understand until you’d finished.  Art is supposed to be interacted with, touched, poked, folded…sometimes you have to get in and do it yourself or it won’t make any sense at all.

I went home that night, folded paper cranes and wrote the the fragmented letters and words with pen upon the paper wings and neck.
I opened the bird’s folds.

=  no don’t let them
run away they won’t
survive on their own
for the world is
cruel and objective
unswayed by
innocence by sweet noises
and softness
the thing with teeth
comes is hungry
and tears to shreds
the soft, folded ears
the vulnerable belly

(Poem by Oni  Buchanan)

Oni Buchanan’s origami poetry strikes me as a beautiful, poignant metaphor for just the type of enigmatic quality literature possesses, and the reader’s attention and curiosity that it requires. Sometimes, often, even, there are worlds beneath, between and within the folds of text that are available only to those who devote the time to question the birds on the page, to wonder what they hold, and to physically fold the paper, write the words, and unfold them to find poetry.  This is the reader’s responsibility, part of the dialogue between author, text, and the active reader.
Looking at the context of the book as a whole, this poetic experiment is not surprising, nor is it incongruous with the work Oni Buchanan sets out to explore. She is fascinated with the playful nature of language, with its hidden facets, she invents games and verbal codes, extending the challenge to break patterns, find connections, and interact with language in creative, innovative ways to her readers. For this writer, poems are akin to chemical reactions, in that each element is deeply dependent upon those that act upon it. In a lab, as in a poem, an experiment may culminate in an explosion, a noxious gas, or an alchemist’s precious metal.

Oni Buchanan’s poetry is often both conceptually and literally interactive.  Attentive, curious readers are rewarded for taking initiative and breaking the code.  In a series of poems titled “The Mandrake Vehicles”, the poet worked from source texts, finding resources detailing characteristics, facts and folk lore about the mandrake root and created from them blocks of prose compiled of images, phrases and ideas about the root. Through seven stages of deconstruction, Buchanan plucks the “heavier” letters from the lines, leaving the “lighter ones to float as the discarded letters drop as residue to the bottom of the page. The remaining letters push together and form a poem. The process repeats, and by the seventh step, the poet has revealed to herself and to her readers to secret poems that existed within the block of prose from the very beginning––the surrounding field of language needed only to be excavated before the poems could emerge and speak.
Here is another example of Buchanan’s affinity for revealing that which appears to be hidden. She finds poetry within the folds of a bird, a frog, a cube, and within blocks of prose. The Mandrake Vehicles are another beautiful demonstration of deformative and performative operations; a testament to the hidden things one can create, unfold and extract, like a silver string from a scarf.

Poet: The best part, for me, about The Mandrake Vehicles is that there are an infinite number of undiscovered poems hidden in these texts that I haven’t discovered yet. Maybe I never will, but you could. There’s a potential poem embedded in everything you read!

The link to the interactive website featuring The Mandrake Vehicles is:
http://www.conduit.org/online/buchanan/buchanan.html