The There Blog

Because Gertrude Stein said "there is no there there."

Monday, April 14, 2008

The poem dictates the poem

I’ve been working on my latest project, Pythia Says, for more than a year now. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that there isn’t more of it. I’ve been writing it in fits and starts — several weeks or a month or two of activity followed by a longer stretch of nothing.

I don’t even know how to describe it — I don’t like calling it “stream of consciousness” as there is quite a bit of conscious action. And it isn’t “found” poetry, except for the Prologue (which is a flarfian bit of Google-generated sentences), although many phrases have been borrowed or appropriated. Instead, the words, phrases, sentences build upon each other, metonymically. Words, sounds, letter formations connect to others; images connect to images; the poem dictates the poem. It forms itself, grows organically, displays its crystalline scaffolding. (I am reminded of Rosemary Waldrop’s essay “Chinese Windmills Turn Horizontally.”)

If anything, it could perhaps be described as “channeled.” I do open myself up in a way to receive the poem, to let the connections tease and trace. And I have a couple touchstone images — visions of “Pythia” — a psychic in a bathtub, a priestess at the edge of an abyss, an old radio picking up distant frequencies.

Monday, April 07, 2008

More on Documentary Poetics

And another thing: after the reading on Saturday night, during the interview portion of the events, Kristin mentioned that she fact-checked the poems in The Straits. The implication, of course, was that accuracy was important to the documentary work she was doing.

Several years ago, when I was writing Valley/Ridge, I was in a workshop in which Remy (who now blogs at Autotypist) wanted me to throw out all the statistics in my poems. Rather, he wanted me to make up the numbers. His argument, if I am remembering it aright and I'm probably not, was that statistics are another form of damn lies and that instead of repeating someone else’s damn lies, I should use my own. And while he was probably right, I just couldn’t let go of the impulse to push toward some “real” representation, some objective documentation or observation.

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Documentary poetry

Saw Juliana Spahr and Kristin Palm last night at SPT. Just an amazing event. Juliana is always an incredibly inspiring writer and performer, and I was jaw-dropped in admiration for her piece about Chilicothee, Ohio. And I was really pleased to see Kristin Palm again (she appeared in the second issue of There). I was also pleased to see her project, The Straits, was finally out in print. I'm looking forward to delving into it.

After the readings, David Buuck interviewed Kristin and Juliana about their work, the "documentary poetry" that they do, the "writing about place." As another "place-writer" and editor of a journal about place (OK, so There is a little bit on hiatus at the moment), I was very interested in how they saw the project they were working on. One thing I was suspicious about, though, was Buuck's continued reference to "found poetry" with regard to their work. And I don't think that's quite an accurate description of what either artist is doing. That points in a "Flarf"-ian direction and both Juliana and Kristin seemed to want to distance themselves from Flarf. If anything, it is research-based, fact-finding poetry, but the language itself seems more "authored" than "found," even when the language is borrowed or appropriated from other sources.

Kristin and Juliana were also asked why they are doing this work in poetry, and not memoir or non-fiction or essays or the like. I'm not sure why it is that they are writing the psycho-geographic (lovely word!), as they seemed to sidestep the question, but I think the answer for me is -- I don't know any other way to write. Valley/Ridge is poetry because poetry is what I write.