Category Archives: Fiction and Poetry

Poetry and Hypertext

Where the coyotes
follow her to the river
and then lose scent
to the days beyond

I’m working through some problems in the current draft of a poem in hypertext.  Of course, one problem is simply finding the time to write during the teaching semester, but time will come over the break for digging into the project.

The topology of one section of the work is an interesting quest to sort out relationships of color, distance, and texture across time and space.  The above stanza is a section of the poem that “crosses to” a great distance, a distance that wants to come to me as an image from my own experience with the desert.

North of Las Cruses, in southern New Mexico, I used to drive through a section of highway that cut through the mountains, to a spot where you could climb up and sit and watch the town’s and city lights appear.  The sky would rise and distances were suggested by blackness behind the lights, the stars, and the bulk of mountains and radio towers across the Rio Grande river in Mexico.   That distance relates to time and memory.  The link, hopefully, will sharpen the potential connections between imagined occurrences and the specific details that make them whole in relation to one another.

Such as the thought of coyotes hunting then losing the scent. But it’s not coyotes.  It’s a darkness in the distance.  It’s something lost and reimagined, found yet still, or potentially,  unfamiliar.

I can still feel the touch of that stone, the warmth of the night, the sweet smell of the near desert misted by the glare of the distant city lights.

Connecticut Poetry Circuit News

Sally Terrell informs us that Sarah Nichols has been selected to tour with the Connecticut Poetry Circuit

I’m pleased to share the good news that Sarah Nichols, a Tunxis student and very talented poet, has been selected for the Connecticut Poetry Circuit for Spring 2009. She will be “on tour” at two- and four-year colleges throughout the state, along with four other poets representing University of Hartford, Yale, Wesleyan, and Albertus Magnus College.

Tunxis will host a reading sometime in late February/early March on a Monday evening.

Poetry Lesson

Writing poetry is easy. You can start with a question:

When I see ants,
I think of _______ ?

Then the writer answers the question.

That’s enough of a poem just with those two lines, I’d think. Because you have a form and you have a relation, hence a tension. Its poetry rather than prose because the visual line breaking makes an emphasis in space and time, but that’s not important. But is this a poem?

When I see ants,
I think of ants.

No. Because no relation has been created and not a spill of tension comes from the two sides of the sentence. No thought, just reaction: no imagery. It could be a poem to write: “When I see ants, I think of my grandmother.” But would that be much entertainment?

When I see ants
I think of my grandmother
how her hand lay
on a white stone
and black ants
walked the rims
of her fingernails

My gardener grandmother
who combed the moon
through her hair at night
and spoke to roses
when the sun drew
fence wire shadows
on the wet patio stone
and taught me to see
ants as ancestors
to fingernails, suns, and moons.

One question, one answer. Of course, none of this is real to me. I did not know a gardener grandmother in this sense. But a few ants around the rock borders are a comfort. They don’t attack unless provoked and are inspiring to watch. It is, however, true in the poem and to the speaker that a grandmother had gray hair and taught her granddaughter to reconsider ants and to affect an image from living things.

Amardeep Singh on the Good Stuff

Amardeep Sing at the Valve writes:

I, on the other hand, couldn’t get away from it. Huh—Is he really picking his nose? It was the first time I had ever seen an acknowledgment to this “shameful” bodily act in print. Can’t we read Stephen’s picking his nose as a kind of satirical counterpoint to the weighty literary and theological allusions that surround this event? My professor’s answer: no. No nose-picking, not in this class.

Fifteen years later, here I am: students, what do you make of the fact that Stephen Dedalus, near the end of this dense cerebral episode on the nature of sensory perception, Aristotle and Aquinas, urinates into the ocean, and picks his nose? What do you make of the fact that Leopold Bloom wakes up with the thought of the “inner organs of beasts and fowls,” cooks a pork kidney for his wife, and then goes to the privy to defecate?

Love it. Of course, if we’re talking about a novel that must by the nature of its telling admit much of human experience, the experience of the body is a logical detail. The fact that Stephen picks his nose: forget students, what would Tennyson say?

Flourishes

Wallace Stevens wrote that a man could be taller than a tree. Here’s how he put it:

I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

The proportions of human space are distorted by the senses. That’s one reaction. Another observes the relation Steven’s discovers about size and how we measure it. What impulse, in addition, sends us off to measure ourselves against trees? It’s an odd thing. Let me stand against a tree and consider my measurements in relation to something grand and massive or let me stand against a tree and understand where I am. Because sometimes this can be difficult to do.

It would appear to be a meaningless or simplistic action. Perhaps like writing a poem or a story. Sometimes we see things we don’t want to see; sometimes images come that we hadn’t considered in a flash or in the car or while pecking at a line, something significant, disturbing, colorful, grand. A beetle becomes a turning planet. The stripe of a finger through dust becomes the top of a giant letter J or someone having just pushed through a pesticide cloud.

Poetry Problems

I’m currently working on a hypertext poem. This means I’m writing poetry. The problem is I’m writing poetry and I have a dozen other things to do. But writing poetry sucks you into an elaborate and time consuming fantasy space, where nothing else should matter but “odes dripping from the tree branches.” Images come and all kinds of problems need to be solved. Then there’s the added problem of “hypertext” poetry with its new aesthetic layers.

I’m writing a hypertext poem because I’m jealous of our students in new media who have all kinds of opportunity to produce, but no, not the teacher, who has a dozen other things to do. That sounds a little boohoo dramatic and certainly this is a condition others would love to grapple with.

I’m going to be sucked in, though, other dozen things be damned.

P.S.: I have found a perfectly reasonable application for stretch text in the project!

Understanding

Dan Green engages a post by Obooki (?)

Since I, too, cannot think of any particular novel that “has changed my thinking about life,” and since I also don’t read novels “for philosophy, for meaning” and am antipathetic to “philosophizing” in novels (as well to the underlying notion that fiction is a medium for “saying something” in the first place), I want to agree with the further claim that no novelist has ever “contributed anything important to human understanding,” but finally I really can’t.

In the narrow sense of the term “understanding” that Obooki seems to be invoking here–“understanding” as philosophically established knowledge–it is certainly true that fiction has contributed almost nothing to the store of human knowledge.

The engagement has generated interesting comments. But I’m wondering at the suggested framework: it’s one thing to claim that fiction may produce human understanding, another thing to say that fiction may generate knowledge (something unknown or unconsidered as related, for example). The distinction matters. Formative knowledge, such as an historical fact, can be conveyed through a fiction, and some fictions may discover a new aesthetic.

But the question of knowledge may lead to an expectation of it. We could ask a different question: a reader may discover an interesting relationship in a fiction or poem. A fiction may uncover something hidden. “Life-changing” is a pretty high and complicated standard. Isn’t the judge in McCarthy’s novel somewhat of a contribution? I admit that the kind of contribution can be an interesting question to pursue.

Not Knowing

Susan Gibb raises pertinent questions in this post in her pursuit of Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She writes

So Tomas has branded them [the Communists] as guilty; ignorance no excuse for action. Yes, I suppose I can justify the outrage, the blame-laying, and yet, there are degrees of guilt that should lessen the pain from the known and committed; the venial versus the mortal sin of the Catholic mind.

There’s another point to add to this. Tomas builds his thinking on Oedipus and concluded based on the king’s “not knowing.” But this is a special “not knowing”; it’s not meant, I don’t think, as a “should have known better” because, for Oedipus, the evidence pointed in every direction but to him. The special condition comes before with unconditional proof in the absence of proof, a stance of certainty, being so sure that paradise is just around the corner.

The special realm of poetry and fiction is not “to know” as a condition of being, but to consider and probe what is and or what presents itself. There are modern equivalents to the paradox of confidence or the paradox of faith and certainty.

We are drowning in them now.

Tracing the Paths

A wonderful conversation here between Shelley Jackson and Vito Acconci at The Believer.

From the perspective of, say, his Mur Island—a floating island in Graz, Austria, that is simultaneously bridge, theater, café, and playground—Acconci’s early poems look like odd little landscapes, with corridors and columns, through which the reader can stroll. Mur Island, in turn, looks like a poem. As a writer whose own words have a way of wandering off the page, I often ask myself why writing, of all the arts, is so narrowly defined. What new books might we write, if we could learn to use objects and spaces, buildings and bodies—the way Acconci learned to make architecture from words on a page?