Tag: serial poem

A Compost Commonplace (I)

At work on a new project, turning this blog into a book, A Compost Commonplace, wrote about it here, and after the first flush of excitement, am up against a prob. One I hope won’t turn me against the whole damn thing.

The blog was made in spontaneity. That was and is the pleasure of it – for me anyway – careful crafting for the words, most def, but writing what came to mind, when and as it did, not so much deliberacy. And then moving on, going, à la O’Hara, on yr nerve.

I thought I saw lots in common between the blog and the serial poem, moving ever forward, trusting your accidents as divine inspiration (or whatever enters the god hole after the whoosh sound is done) – and, too, between the blog and the commonplace book, those old school assemblages of finds, best loosely gathered, so the mind of the one you love and hand it to can step in to complete the act.

I wanted something else too, though, something that’d warrant durable fastening to the page. What struck me was the medieval folio, whose deployments of attention are so marvelously lateral – weirdly like our online pages, drawing the eye left, right, up, down, through this window, that door. As if the printed page we’re used to, dictating a steady advance from upper-left to lower-right, is a quincentennial interregnum not so hard to bound over. So, a technique: use the designs of old pages as shells for my new pages.

Do you wonder why, in Trump’s America, late 2018, I resonate to any reminder of the mind’s freedom? I haven’t written about it much here recently, but the news. Oh, to take just one example, three authoritarian governments are jockeying in the media for control of the narrative, and geopolitical advantage thereby, that frames the state-sponsored murder of a dissident journalist. It, and all the rest, has me so alert to incipient fascism, for I’m not sure that’s not where we are, see this editorial (NYT) on the matter, I see it even in the frame of mind page a proposes to its reader.

Here’s what, back on topic, not to do. I know, cuz I did it. The shell I took from the Lindisfarne Gospels:

Lindisfarne – Matthew incipit
“Book of Matthew,” incipit page. The Lindisfarne Gospels, folio 27r.

 

Under the spell of its colours and lines, I did this:

Commonplace – Now I amI went and mistook a shiny surface for – what. I dunno. But this is sad abject mimicry. There’s one in my current draft even worse I’m not gonna show.

In the spirit of trusting yr dismay (see here) I can tell you, I’m grateful for the sourness this page stirred in me. B/c it directed me towards a conundrum of this project.

Namely. The ethic here is projective, spontaneity, an increase in freedom. The blog says so. The serial poem it rhymes with says so. The commonplace book they both recall me to says so. But the formal idea I chose as harness – is a complex, chastening harness. The medieval illuminated page – really? To model after it asks a precise controlled & essentially worried attention & calls forth a part of myself I’d like to have thrown off.

All the delighted fascination I’ve felt, finicking margins, colours, guidelines, has come under suspicion. The pleasure it of it’s close to the pleasure of control.

It is, in Blake’s terms, Energy up against Reason. Mother of all traffic stops.

If I don’t find a way to marry ’em, the whole thing’s toast, and a waste.

From blog to book

It’s a bad idea to turn your blog into a book. And, looks like that’s not going to stop me. About a week ago, revisiting my first posts, I realized there’s a coherence to what I’ve been up to here, and this blog began to look like the foundation of another project.

Gonna take a few years to do right. And some study – of desktop publishing software, and of typesetting and manuscript traditions, European, Asian, South American, at least. I’m pumped. Here’s the prefatory note I knocked out this morning.

About this book

It began as a blog. You can read a rough draft of it at theartofcompost.com.

I’ve translated my blog here into a chimeric bookish form. Chimera, as in hybrid, collage, a robe of patches.

The Chimaera of Lycia in Asia Minor was a lion in front, a goat in the middle, a snake at the rear, said Homer, and breathed fire.

“This old plum tree is boundless. It forms spring; it forms winter. It arouses wind and wild rain. It is the head of a patch-robed monk; it is the eyeball of an ancient buddha. It becomes grass and trees; it becomes pure fragrance. Its whirling, miraculous transformation has no limit.” Dōgen.

The lion of it is the serial poem, as described by the poets Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser. Like a blog, it’s written in sequence, with little or no looking back – Orpheus, rampant, headlong.

The goat, which eats everything, is the commonplace book, where one tends to a moving picture of one’s mind by gathering and arranging discoveries – quotations, letters, poems, recipes, tables of weights and measures, &c. It tends toward miscellany, scrapbookhood; very like a blog.

And the serpent, whose mind is the onset of the idea of form, a marriage of line and curve, so that it moves forward by twisting side to side, is the fashioned page – whose history I have ransacked. Each page here is set in homage to or mimicry of some published surface, its visible arrangement, i.e., its deployment of attention.

With a special place for late medieval manuscript and early modern European typesetting practices, columns of glosses, embankments of notes. Like blog posts, with their frames and hyperlinks, these surfaces tempt attention off its chosen path, lateral movements to a periphery or through doors behind which the unseen.

Nothing says you have to read it in order. Nothing says you have anything.

That last sentence kicked me in the teeth as it came out. Clarified for me that the book will be, not about exactly, but on the terrain of, dispossession. Here’s the first page

Compost library

Working title, A Compost Commonplace. Stay tuned, oh do!

 

 

The course

If the blog’s to be companion to the course, the course can be companion to the blog also, and I hope they’ll be buds, swapping gists and piths. Here’s what the syllabus will say to our brave company at the opening.

When you make compost you break down old forms to make new forms. From banana peels and lawn clippings you grow a lemon tree. From street signs and Twitter feeds you grow a poem or a flash essay. In this class you’ll turn a fairytale inside-out. You’ll burrow wormwise through your own prose in search of the secret text it holds. You’ll build a poem out of physical objects. What you won’t do is stare at a blank page or screen trying to figure out “what on earth to say.” In other words, your life’s already a perfect poem, a perfect story, a perfect meditation, you just need to compose it a bit.

I’m new to bloggery but already very struck by how form and process extend the content and back again. I’ve long loved the thought and the fact of the serial poem (e.g., Spicer’s Language, Blaser’s Moth Poem) but haven’t till now come close to composing one …

(There’s a thought in me half-formed about Black Mountain prose style, its relentless parataxis, and how like that the serial poem is in its play ethic. Something about going on your nerve, not resorting to a supervisory intelligence, the mind that knows as the sentence begins what the whole of it will say. A dead form, nature mort. Gonna mull this one a bit more.)