It's hard to know what is helpful when reading each other's fiction, both as a teacher and as a student. For workshops, however, I try to stick to a system much as we did with poetry that will help the writer hear what others are reading in her or his text. In general, we talk a lot about strengthening the conflict, though that is a very old-fashioned way to think about fiction. We talk too in phrases like "What is at stake?" This translates loosely to, Why should I bother following these people across the pages? What difference do these events and scenes really make to their lives. This too is only somewhat helpful. Yet with these imperfect means we must begin.
1. Situation: What is happening in this story? What is the POV--the point from which we know anything? Remember: there are an infinite number of ways to tell a story. Why is it being told this way?
2. Characters: Is the hero/antihero believable? Are the people around her or him believable? Do we know what these people want?
3. Conflict: What is the problem here? (This is often, but not always, the 'reason' for the story.) Is this problem big enough to hold my interest? Does it arise soon enough in the narrative? (Closely linked to: What [or where] is the emotional center of this piece?)
4. Setting: Where am I? Is this place real? What metaphors does the setting provide?
5. Resolution: Does the whole hold together? Does the ending belong in the version of reality that has been created by the story?
All up for discussion.
28 February 2011
26 January 2011
Class Today!
Looking forward to seeing my students at 12:30. We will end at 1:25, so that I can catch the 1:38 bus. Here is a famous Wallace Stevens poem about winter in case you were feeling too chipper.
The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
17 November 2010
Smart Things Selah Saterstrom Said in an Interview with Christian Peet
Since we're reading The Pink Institution, which forces us to think about form, and since I'm forcing you to blog about revision, which also forces you to consider form, I now present these excepts from Selah Saterstrom, interviewed by Christian Peet in Tarpaulin Sky.
SS: …I would identify that “narrative” as a collection of images that have intersected and conjoined through time in such a way that feels right—inexhaustible, non negotiable. I am interested in the articulations that erupt as a result of these images being in relation. This is a process I would call “narrative.” Like a weed growing between two concrete blocks of an interstate overpass. Despite smog and lack of nourishment, certain conditions are present so that a manifestation arises from the space between the edges of those blocks. I feel narrative as inevitable, evolutionary, like interstate weeds. Where there are things and conditions, there is narrative.
The trick is breaking the images until they yield the most poignant set of articulations. . . then arranging those articulations into a larger pattern that feels honest, is not exclusive, and has a poignancy that deserves visibility [enter self doubt]. The trick of waiting, seeing, risking, failing.
Is this work fiction? Trans-genre? I don’t know. I recently went through a period in which I was so hung up on what genre I was writing in that it became debilitating. During this time the election was going on and I dealt with it by reading loser’s points of view through history. I started to read Japanese accounts of Hiroshima, which re-triggered years of previous Holocaust readings.
After atrocities forms emerge, often called avant-garde forms. Looking at avant-garde as a literal translation, these forms may be “forward looking” but they feel more to me like forms of present moment witness. How does one speak after a violence that literally reconfigures the cellular structure of things, that, in its erasure, records the shadow of what is no longer present? Out of necessity forms arise to speak a language that must also speak these losses and transfigurations.
Thinking about these things, I realized it would be more productive and better for me to switch from the question: “What genre am I writing in?” to: “How can I be a more pure filter through which language can pattern the mystery of my concerns?” At this point I’ve chosen a sense of urgency over a sense of knowing.
I’ve been thinking about the space of the page as an installation space, the text as installation. Some of the pieces express this more visually than others. But even when form is not working in this overtly visual way, every line, be it a recognizable sentence or not, is broken intentionally as I write. I experience form both as a way of seeing and the thing seen because it is simultaneously process and artifact.
CP: I once heard you say—and I may be paraphrasing incorrectly—that revision is a process of learning to see more clearly. Would you explain this? Also, what is the importance of negative space, of what is not seen in your work? In The Pink Institution, God took the form of an eraser. Is revision an act of God?
SS: Ha hahaaaa . . . hell yes sometimes it feels like revision is an act of God because it feels like it would take an act of God to make a piece work. But seriously, in terms of revision as a phenomena that is act of God. . . I don’t know. Because genocide, for example, is a form of revision. In turn this revision can lead to re-visioned forms to speak about the experience itself. The process of remembering, also revision. Pollution: a process of planetary revision. Life, death, nature: revision. And so on. It could be that revision is a non negotiable character in the existential drama. This doesn’t disinvite God into the scenario, but it doesn’t place God as The Force causing the scenario. It’s a big subject. . . does God exist outside one’s own accountability?
We invoke revision in good and terrible ways, but it is a mode of surviving. Acquiring language as a child is a kind of revision process—one revises a semiotic understanding of self and world and the “I” is born, subject placement established. One is less likely to be eaten by wolves if one can distinguish one’s self from the wolves. Being food doesn’t have to imply your connections are rooted in dichotomy (you v/s wolves). It just suggests ways those connections might be expressed.
In terms of my own writing process, editing/revision is a space where I have encountered something I personally consider holy, but really it is very ordinary. It feels holy because it’s rare. Again, Grace Paley’s idea of getting the lies out comes to mind. When I’m at a place with a piece and I’m able to, if only for a moment, live with my own contradictions without somehow medicating myself, that can feel like grace.
SS: …I would identify that “narrative” as a collection of images that have intersected and conjoined through time in such a way that feels right—inexhaustible, non negotiable. I am interested in the articulations that erupt as a result of these images being in relation. This is a process I would call “narrative.” Like a weed growing between two concrete blocks of an interstate overpass. Despite smog and lack of nourishment, certain conditions are present so that a manifestation arises from the space between the edges of those blocks. I feel narrative as inevitable, evolutionary, like interstate weeds. Where there are things and conditions, there is narrative.
The trick is breaking the images until they yield the most poignant set of articulations. . . then arranging those articulations into a larger pattern that feels honest, is not exclusive, and has a poignancy that deserves visibility [enter self doubt]. The trick of waiting, seeing, risking, failing.
Is this work fiction? Trans-genre? I don’t know. I recently went through a period in which I was so hung up on what genre I was writing in that it became debilitating. During this time the election was going on and I dealt with it by reading loser’s points of view through history. I started to read Japanese accounts of Hiroshima, which re-triggered years of previous Holocaust readings.
After atrocities forms emerge, often called avant-garde forms. Looking at avant-garde as a literal translation, these forms may be “forward looking” but they feel more to me like forms of present moment witness. How does one speak after a violence that literally reconfigures the cellular structure of things, that, in its erasure, records the shadow of what is no longer present? Out of necessity forms arise to speak a language that must also speak these losses and transfigurations.
Thinking about these things, I realized it would be more productive and better for me to switch from the question: “What genre am I writing in?” to: “How can I be a more pure filter through which language can pattern the mystery of my concerns?” At this point I’ve chosen a sense of urgency over a sense of knowing.
I’ve been thinking about the space of the page as an installation space, the text as installation. Some of the pieces express this more visually than others. But even when form is not working in this overtly visual way, every line, be it a recognizable sentence or not, is broken intentionally as I write. I experience form both as a way of seeing and the thing seen because it is simultaneously process and artifact.
CP: I once heard you say—and I may be paraphrasing incorrectly—that revision is a process of learning to see more clearly. Would you explain this? Also, what is the importance of negative space, of what is not seen in your work? In The Pink Institution, God took the form of an eraser. Is revision an act of God?
SS: Ha hahaaaa . . . hell yes sometimes it feels like revision is an act of God because it feels like it would take an act of God to make a piece work. But seriously, in terms of revision as a phenomena that is act of God. . . I don’t know. Because genocide, for example, is a form of revision. In turn this revision can lead to re-visioned forms to speak about the experience itself. The process of remembering, also revision. Pollution: a process of planetary revision. Life, death, nature: revision. And so on. It could be that revision is a non negotiable character in the existential drama. This doesn’t disinvite God into the scenario, but it doesn’t place God as The Force causing the scenario. It’s a big subject. . . does God exist outside one’s own accountability?
We invoke revision in good and terrible ways, but it is a mode of surviving. Acquiring language as a child is a kind of revision process—one revises a semiotic understanding of self and world and the “I” is born, subject placement established. One is less likely to be eaten by wolves if one can distinguish one’s self from the wolves. Being food doesn’t have to imply your connections are rooted in dichotomy (you v/s wolves). It just suggests ways those connections might be expressed.
In terms of my own writing process, editing/revision is a space where I have encountered something I personally consider holy, but really it is very ordinary. It feels holy because it’s rare. Again, Grace Paley’s idea of getting the lies out comes to mind. When I’m at a place with a piece and I’m able to, if only for a moment, live with my own contradictions without somehow medicating myself, that can feel like grace.
03 November 2010
If on a winter's night a traveler is not the easiest book ever assigned
Nor is it the hardest, once you get into the rhythm of it, the weaving in and out of story, to and fro with the anti-author's narration. The story of a narrator who is a reader.
I don't write to defend it, but I do urge you to laugh.
Yes, laugh.
It's a book that's frustrating to read, sure, but its main topic is frustration, after all. The book is therefore a joke book. At the same time it's a mystery, and as I read (and not for the first time) I can't help but remember my long-past afternoons with Nancy Drew mysteries. How desperate I was to know it was all going to be solved, that the criminal would pay, that there was justice. I was so desperate that I couldn't wait till the end of the book but had to read ahead, usually skimming the last three or four pages to find the answer. Afterward, satisfied, I would return to the middle to enjoy the ride. Every book I would promise myself that I wouldn't cheat, wouldn't look ahead, but I couldn't ever resist. That's the feeling I have with Calvino--what's the truth about this story? Will these people ever get their book? And will they ever have sex? I want to look ahead. But I've read the end, and I know what I always suspected, and what you must suspect, too.....
I don't write to defend it, but I do urge you to laugh.
Yes, laugh.
It's a book that's frustrating to read, sure, but its main topic is frustration, after all. The book is therefore a joke book. At the same time it's a mystery, and as I read (and not for the first time) I can't help but remember my long-past afternoons with Nancy Drew mysteries. How desperate I was to know it was all going to be solved, that the criminal would pay, that there was justice. I was so desperate that I couldn't wait till the end of the book but had to read ahead, usually skimming the last three or four pages to find the answer. Afterward, satisfied, I would return to the middle to enjoy the ride. Every book I would promise myself that I wouldn't cheat, wouldn't look ahead, but I couldn't ever resist. That's the feeling I have with Calvino--what's the truth about this story? Will these people ever get their book? And will they ever have sex? I want to look ahead. But I've read the end, and I know what I always suspected, and what you must suspect, too.....
21 October 2010
Whither Vito Acconci? Notes on Conceptual Poetry
A bunch of years ago, the late, great Jerry Cox brought me to a Houston museum to hear a disembodied voice (actually a stereo buried in the floorboards) asking over and over:
“How bad is it going to smell when it starts to smell?”
This got my attention.
The voice belonged to Vito Acconci, an artist who made his name using audio and video to often salacious effect. Most famously, Acconci once masturbated under the floorboards of Ileanna Sonnabend’s new Soho gallery while announcing into a mike his fantasies about the people walking above him. (When he told Sonnabend of his plans, the vivid Romanian art dealer said, "Do what you have to do, Vito.")
That was 1971. Since then Vito’s settled down a bit, studied architecture. He now works on large installations, or architectural interventions, and calls himself a landscape architect. But before all this, in the very, very beginning, he was a poet. Which is why I'm writing this blog today.
And what a poet. As a young man writing in the sixties, he was not the only one questioning the fact of poetry, of writing at all. But he took it to a heady extreme. A risqué performance piece is one thing, but Vito’s conceptual poetry still shocks this parochial school gal. (VA, by the bye, as also a parochial school kid—from the Bronx.) He began writing poems like READ THIS WORD:
READ THIS WORD THEN READ THIS WORD READ THIS WORD NEXT READ THIS WORD NOW SEE ONE WORD SEE ONE WORD NEXT SEE ONE WORD NOW AND THEN SEE ONE WORD AGAIN....
It goes on. And here is a fine, and slightly further out, example from 1969. (I'd love to upload it but cannot.) Check the link for semiotics in the purest sense, the awareness that words are mere metaphors, theatrical artifice, not real at all—even as he mocks the reader with the artifice, too. He explains the process quite clearly here:
Because I was so interested in the page as a field for movement, eventually the choice of words became a problem. It seemed to be impossible to use on a page a word like “tree,” a word like “chair,” because this referred to another space. Whereas I could use on a page a word like “there.” Or phrases such as “at that time” or “at that place.” In other words, words that directly referred to my act of writing on the page, your act of reading the page. In short, I was writing myself into a corner, writing myself into a position where in order to preserve the literalness of the page, the only thing I could put on the page were periods, commas, punctuation marks.
The only things he could put on the page were periods, commas and punctuation marks?
!!
!!!!!!
Now, such conceptual questioning makes no appearance in my work and really never has. (Though it has occurred to me that only a parochial school kid could be so angry about the hollow symbols that are words that he'd write poems made of punctuation marks.) Yet I torture students with it year after year. Why do I do this, when it's so clear that you want to write stories about real life, about family and love and murder and the occasional vampire?
I do it so you can set off on your own explorations, and to remind you (and myself) of the made-up-ness of the enterprise of writing, the constriction of the rules that we don’t even know we’re following because they are the air we – dash into headlong.
What prompted me to write to you today, and not last week or next week? A book review from The Constant Critic, always full of smart reminders of what’s new and coming. (You can sign up for their notices of new reviews yourself.) Here, in a piece called "No Content," the hilarious Vanessa Place (a conceptual poet, editor and lawyer who has been tweeting Gone With the Wind in its entirety) focuses on three new-ish conceptual poetry books. (As it happens, Vito Acconci did not exhaust the page as he thought. He just got bored with it. His heirs continue--and some of his heirs came before him. (See my post from last February.))
I urge you to read the review, if not the books, but will recap just in case you don't. The first book Place takes up is a collection of poems from marginalia—that's right, poems from the little notes left by strangers in books and forgotten. Liam Agrani, the poet/editor and librarian (naturally) who pulled it together, has been working on Volume One: Selected Anonymous Marginalia for ten years. That's devotion to the god in the details. Then, Ryan Haley’s Autobiography: Volume One is a series of lists of words—and yes, a list can be a poem--or fiction, for that matter—that appeared in our language, or rather in the venerated OED, from 1975 to 1993.
My favorite? Servants of Dust by Gary Barwin. The book is published in Calgary by some folks who call themselves No Press, with the byline: “No press: no promotions, no advance, no problem.” Indeed, they are so no-promoting that I couldn’t find them or the book. (I’ve written Barwin to learn how to get a copy and am eagerly awaiting response.) Barwin offers literal transcriptions of the punctuation marks on Shakespeare’s sonnets. (Very Vito.) I urge you to check out Vanessa’s review to see her transcription of Barwin’s transcription of Sonnet 18, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? The famous first line becomes:
inverted comma question mark
Barwin's The Punctuation of Thieves, which Place doesn't review, contains far more traditional poems, each dedicated to punctuation marks, lovingly and merrily illustrated. They remind me a little of Neruda's Elemental Odes. Available for download here, take it! Enjoy!
Fittingly, I’ll excerpt the one to the period and sign off for now:
.At the end of a sentence a period, a full stop. Peer into its
darkness, a celestial sky so dark nothing is visible save
the darkness itself.
“How bad is it going to smell when it starts to smell?”
This got my attention.
The voice belonged to Vito Acconci, an artist who made his name using audio and video to often salacious effect. Most famously, Acconci once masturbated under the floorboards of Ileanna Sonnabend’s new Soho gallery while announcing into a mike his fantasies about the people walking above him. (When he told Sonnabend of his plans, the vivid Romanian art dealer said, "Do what you have to do, Vito.")
That was 1971. Since then Vito’s settled down a bit, studied architecture. He now works on large installations, or architectural interventions, and calls himself a landscape architect. But before all this, in the very, very beginning, he was a poet. Which is why I'm writing this blog today.
And what a poet. As a young man writing in the sixties, he was not the only one questioning the fact of poetry, of writing at all. But he took it to a heady extreme. A risqué performance piece is one thing, but Vito’s conceptual poetry still shocks this parochial school gal. (VA, by the bye, as also a parochial school kid—from the Bronx.) He began writing poems like READ THIS WORD:
READ THIS WORD THEN READ THIS WORD READ THIS WORD NEXT READ THIS WORD NOW SEE ONE WORD SEE ONE WORD NEXT SEE ONE WORD NOW AND THEN SEE ONE WORD AGAIN....
It goes on. And here is a fine, and slightly further out, example from 1969. (I'd love to upload it but cannot.) Check the link for semiotics in the purest sense, the awareness that words are mere metaphors, theatrical artifice, not real at all—even as he mocks the reader with the artifice, too. He explains the process quite clearly here:
Because I was so interested in the page as a field for movement, eventually the choice of words became a problem. It seemed to be impossible to use on a page a word like “tree,” a word like “chair,” because this referred to another space. Whereas I could use on a page a word like “there.” Or phrases such as “at that time” or “at that place.” In other words, words that directly referred to my act of writing on the page, your act of reading the page. In short, I was writing myself into a corner, writing myself into a position where in order to preserve the literalness of the page, the only thing I could put on the page were periods, commas, punctuation marks.
The only things he could put on the page were periods, commas and punctuation marks?
!!
!!!!!!
Now, such conceptual questioning makes no appearance in my work and really never has. (Though it has occurred to me that only a parochial school kid could be so angry about the hollow symbols that are words that he'd write poems made of punctuation marks.) Yet I torture students with it year after year. Why do I do this, when it's so clear that you want to write stories about real life, about family and love and murder and the occasional vampire?
I do it so you can set off on your own explorations, and to remind you (and myself) of the made-up-ness of the enterprise of writing, the constriction of the rules that we don’t even know we’re following because they are the air we – dash into headlong.
What prompted me to write to you today, and not last week or next week? A book review from The Constant Critic, always full of smart reminders of what’s new and coming. (You can sign up for their notices of new reviews yourself.) Here, in a piece called "No Content," the hilarious Vanessa Place (a conceptual poet, editor and lawyer who has been tweeting Gone With the Wind in its entirety) focuses on three new-ish conceptual poetry books. (As it happens, Vito Acconci did not exhaust the page as he thought. He just got bored with it. His heirs continue--and some of his heirs came before him. (See my post from last February.))
I urge you to read the review, if not the books, but will recap just in case you don't. The first book Place takes up is a collection of poems from marginalia—that's right, poems from the little notes left by strangers in books and forgotten. Liam Agrani, the poet/editor and librarian (naturally) who pulled it together, has been working on Volume One: Selected Anonymous Marginalia for ten years. That's devotion to the god in the details. Then, Ryan Haley’s Autobiography: Volume One is a series of lists of words—and yes, a list can be a poem--or fiction, for that matter—that appeared in our language, or rather in the venerated OED, from 1975 to 1993.
My favorite? Servants of Dust by Gary Barwin. The book is published in Calgary by some folks who call themselves No Press, with the byline: “No press: no promotions, no advance, no problem.” Indeed, they are so no-promoting that I couldn’t find them or the book. (I’ve written Barwin to learn how to get a copy and am eagerly awaiting response.) Barwin offers literal transcriptions of the punctuation marks on Shakespeare’s sonnets. (Very Vito.) I urge you to check out Vanessa’s review to see her transcription of Barwin’s transcription of Sonnet 18, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? The famous first line becomes:
inverted comma question mark
Barwin's The Punctuation of Thieves, which Place doesn't review, contains far more traditional poems, each dedicated to punctuation marks, lovingly and merrily illustrated. They remind me a little of Neruda's Elemental Odes. Available for download here, take it! Enjoy!
Fittingly, I’ll excerpt the one to the period and sign off for now:
.At the end of a sentence a period, a full stop. Peer into its
darkness, a celestial sky so dark nothing is visible save
the darkness itself.
20 October 2010
07 October 2010
Apropos Jane
Just found this hilarious web service that outputs random dialogue from Pride and Prejudice. Input the number of sentences you want, and you'll get lines from Jane Austen herself.
http://jonathanaquino.com/austen.php?sentences=3
It was engineered by Canadian software designer Jon Aquino, who blogs here. He's quite a character, also running poetry podcasts and other blogs on topics like "Cool Tools for Catholics."
Viva technology.
http://jonathanaquino.com/austen.php?sentences=3
It was engineered by Canadian software designer Jon Aquino, who blogs here. He's quite a character, also running poetry podcasts and other blogs on topics like "Cool Tools for Catholics."
Viva technology.
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