A Creation in Time

I finished responding to a brief interview today, but one that I think covered valuable ground, at least for my purposes. The process of responding to the set of questions presented to me allowed me to think through a few issues and to clarify them to myself. Here are two paragraphs from my response, two paragraphs on the idea that everything we create, certainly everything I create, is bound inexorably with the moment of its creation.

My poetics is a poetics of presence within the language. Thus the process of composition, the act of creating something at a particular moment, is an essential component of that poetics. I understand, accept, and promote the idea that we write what we write only because we created it at a particular moment. Sleepiness, ambient sound, a certain slant of light, and the experiences we've accumulated at a particular point in time all converge on the poem to create it. All writing is extemporaneous because it is always bound by the temporal sphere. There's no escaping it.

That book of tiny poems of mine is merely one piece of evidence of that. It's a book written at night during the winter, and I think it is clear that that is when it was written. It's a book written while just having read two books of minimalist poetry, Robert Grenier's Sentences and Mark Truscott's Said Like Reeds or Things. It's a book written into a little notebook Roy Arenella gave me, and that determined the number of poems in the book and the number of lines a poem could have. That notebook was also the direct inspiration for a pwoermd I appropriated wholesale. I wrote these poems to my wife Nancy while she was asleep, and that also affected what I would write. If I'd written the same book on another night, it would have been something else entirely. It is the accumulation of one man's experiences at one point in time, with those experiences most near in time affecting its production the most.

ecr. l'inf.