Space XVI
I wouldn’t normally do this, but on advice, I am posting a tid-bit from a workshop I’m taking. It’s a tid essay on voice, which I have ambivalent feelings talking about. Also, a description of a project I’m working on. Umm.
A Voice within a Voice within a Voice within a Voice …
I have resented the cleanliness and elegance of tight and perfect writing. I have felt that writing should be dirtier and more excessive. I still feel this way. Often. Not all the time. A person has the right to feel in many different ways.
-Ariana Reine
I cannot start with a magical notion of voice, the voice of ________ speaking through me. Rather, I want to think of voice as an end product and how this end product comes to be. That is, if there is magic, it’s the magic of microchips, moveable joints, and communication of associative thoughts via these instruments.
When I think voice (or poetics) I think syntax and lexicon. That is to say, when I write and a construction or word happens I often try to think of a replacement. For example, “a banana handed” can become “that yellow fruit gun.” Some (i.e. truncated list) of the poets, to me, that inspire surprise: John Berryman, Karen Volkman, Harryette Mullen, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Tenney Nathanson, William Carlos Williams (particularly “At the Faucet of June”) and others. They seem to offer a platter of interesting words in interesting situations. I, too, want to scramble words and see if they can come together in surprising and pleasant ways.
I find subject matter interesting when a strange lexicon is attached to it. I wrote a long poem about Antarctica because of the interesting language the early explorers used in their journals. Dry and optimistic, totally unreal to their situation. There is ice formation and equipment jargon as well. Though I do not restrict myself to subjects connected to a particular jargon, I find that most any subject produces a kind of jargon, and this results in the subject’s, and my own, voice. Love is a jargon of proclamations and silences. Lawn mowing a jargon of fits, grass spray, rock tings, and stained sneakers. If there is some magic in subject matter, it is the strange way we speak about things.
Overall I have noticed that my voice is objective. Not always, but most often. I like this objectivity because it gives me a chance to explore what would be my voice as well as other voices not mine; those outside my white, heterosexual male (whm) spectrum (to what extent that’s possible). I think this good, though my attempts at otherness probably fail more often than not because of my limited whm perspective.
I will describe my current project. It is composed in a Word document using words and space. The overall voice is composed of many smaller voices. That is, I started three different projects with different voices that had casual relations and which I want to bring together under one voice. The first sequence concentrates on emphasis (via Julia Carlson’s lecture last year) and repetition. To my ear these poems have very little voice, are very objective, very fragmented, have no pronouns, and at times are without much meaning to them at all. I enjoyed writing these very much. The next sequence I wrote moved away from emphasis and concentrated on imagistic renderings of light. I used pronouns in this series, but in universal ways so as to retain a somewhat objective voice. The images and use of pronouns, I think, give these poems some emotion. The third sequence came from a frustration of trying to get the first two sequences to talk each other. I tried and tried but they were resistant. So, I wrote a sequence that took a little from each of the previous sequences: a little emphasis, a little imagery, etc. As I wrote the last sequence I also began thinking of writing a thirty page poem. Why thirty pages I don’t know, it just seemed like a good number. I finally decided that the long poem was going to be a noir poem and this long noir poem would contain the three sequences. This came from a pedestrian interest in noir and recently watching Hollywoodland, not a bad movie. The noir voice is interesting to me and even comes with fun jargon. A jargon I’m going to have to do some more thinking about. So, what I am now attempting to write is a long voice that incorporates smaller voices to make one long and variant voice. I don’t know if all this is going to work together, but I’m having fun trying.
posted by Michael Rerick @ 5:26 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Oh look look, I found a poem in your essay!
"Love is a jargon of proclamations and silences. Lawn mowing a jargon of fits, grass spray, rock tings, and stained sneakers."
And what an essay essay! Sorry about the exclamation points. I often adore your mind. I wish I could write about my poetics the way you do. At least the way you attempt to. Bachelard supports you, he says, "psychic continuity is not given but made," and "[we] must first be cleared of all false permanence and ill-made durations, and disorganized temporally." That is, in order to gain rhythmic attentiveness and repose. "[one tries to] bring our desire to dissociate to bear on the very fabric of time itself." Perhaps you desire an a priori reason, as Kant, who thought Copernicus's idea of the sun and stars revolving around the spectator ought more successfully to have been the spectator revolving and the stars remaining at rest. Kant would have had fun with Eliot's objective you know what...huh. Anyway...I'm not sure about the whole white hetero male bit of this tid, but hey, who am I? I wish I were more of an isolationist, but doesn't syntax love context?
I was thinking more about he wmh part of your movement de stijl (if I may offer my possibly wfh view from here); I kept thinking, object, objective, white male heterosexual, objectivism; and then I thought, "huh." It occurred to me to ask myself (and you) whether or not you thought a (here we go) typical (sorry) wmh would want to allow for so much interpretation from the reader without controlling the subject matter so the “voice,” ultimately, came off as judicious or intentional. That control and intentionality seems to me to be a signature product/goal of the whm perspective and experience. Language regulated this way, soldiering forth as “the privileged domain,” as J. Butler calls it, proscribes its own intentionality (toward magic, surprise). So I suppose it would be natural to run from that, and would that more would run (and fast). But how lovely that you would be so hysterical to promote the objectivity of utterance! I consider this reverse interpellation: “when I write and a construction or word happens I often try to think of a replacement.” What are these supervenient acts of creation worth? What happens to the illocutionary force if it holds still as Kant’s spectator?
Who’s idea is more queer? Kant’s or Copernicus’s? If queering (if we are referring to “magic” or “surprise” in languaging) is an objective.
Reading noir now, and with this essay helps me see. How less we should talk, and not instead of this.
M,
My day sucked until I read this.
"pedestrian" interest in noir??? What? Don't be coy, MR. Noir is anything but pedestrian... (except for the fact that involves lots of cool looking people walking around and doing voice overs...)
Well, a white guy doing noir, a _____ feeling always a new skin seems appropriate, but what new skin? And lots of voice overs, lots and lots. And driving. Maybe some flying at some point. And lotsa drinkin.
I can see a pedestrian interest in noir, as in:
"He had a pedestrian interest in noir; he lit a cigarette. Outside the theater, the whole world went by."
Or, maybe I'm just seeing things.
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