A Constraining Force (A Fifty-Sixth Letter to a Young, Imaginary Visual Poet)
Delta Flight 2863 over Utah
No, it isn't that I've forgotten you or about you, though I can understand why that thought would pass through your mind only to find purchase. The explanation is simply that I've been too busy to remember what I want to do, so I do whatever is most presently at hand. Since the end of May, that has meant writing a letter (in the form of a poem) to a different person every day, one day a male, one day female, back and forth for 240 days now. It's a tiring process, but it does get to your question at hand--or your point of conversation. It is not as if you're merely asking me questions anymore, so be sure you realize that.
What you call a "liberating shackle" is what I'd call a constraint, what we used to call little more than poetic form or prosody. So just as a certain rhyme scheme is a constraint, so is the decision you've made to create on sheets of paper 24 inches by 36 inches. That size holds you to its size (not much holding going on there there), but it also gives you certain freedoms and certain inspirations. Poets have generally dispensed with regular meter and rhyme, but they've replaced it with all manner of constraints, all of which promise something simple: opportunity.
A constraint is the germ of an idea absent the idea itself, yet it still works. Or it can work. Nothing is certain, and certainly not in poetry.
So what's the constraint in these letters I'm writing? Am I hewing closely to a certain style of writing? No, or at least I'm trying not to. I'm actually trying to write poems, to write letters, as different from each other as I can imagine them. So maybe one constraint is that I'm supposed to think up a new way to write a letter/poem ever day. But that really can't count, because I don't succeed at that, because the constraint is too vague. Can't I always argue one poem is different from another?
My constraint is a physical constraint, a temporal constraint, a test of stamina. I'm forced to write a poem every day, and a fairly long one, from three to twelve pages in length (though usually three, and occasionally even two). And I like that constraint. I cannot wait for inspiration. Instead, I have to create it every evening (for I usually write at night).
It is a hugely demanding process, physically and mentally. I just don't have the imagination for this, but I go on with it. I force myself to write when I'm tired, when I have no ideas, when I'm not sure who to write to. (And I should write one to you, but I'm not sure it makes sense to.) And sometimes I say to myself that this will kill me. I've written 240 poems so far, just finished the latest one, so I have 125 to go, and that's a large number of poems to write in a year, let alone a few months.
By the end of this, I'll have a huge manuscript, something the size of a collected poems, yet it'll be only a small portion of my total output over my life. Probably 1300 manuscript pages in length. Too much for anyone to read. So it is, in a certain sense, a conceptual practice. The poems are too numerous to be read, or even appreciated if they are read, so the project exists as an example of mania, and it is understood in a fragmentary way. Those who receive letters read their own letters, and understand that small part of the project. Only a very few people have read them all. This is an unpublishable book, and that's one reason why I post every poem as I write it.
And you'll be happy to know that all of these poems are not textual poems. Some of them are visual poems. Some are sound poems based on scores I present online. They cover a range.
I get them done only because I work on them diligently, only because I've always been able to ignore the physical to complete whatever intellectual or physical project I want to finish. I'm stubborn, and this is a project, a program, maybe a life, born out of stubbornness. I'm stubborn enough to be writing this to you from an airplane, and I've already written today's poem on this same flight, and already published online while I've been flying.
That way it can't be lost, even if this plane crashes. That is the secret of small pieces of paper covered with words: they can prove we were here and give people some sense of us even after we are dead.
I'm flying to a funeral now, so I'm thinking of the dead, but I don't work for the dead. I work for the living. I don't even work for the sake of a dead me. I work for the life of making something. It's the way you are. That's why I noted the ink under your fingernails that one time we met, why I noted the ink filling the whorls of a few of your fingerprints. The art is you. The need to make is in you. You cannot expel it.
When you try, all you do is make a poem.
ecr. l'inf.
No, it isn't that I've forgotten you or about you, though I can understand why that thought would pass through your mind only to find purchase. The explanation is simply that I've been too busy to remember what I want to do, so I do whatever is most presently at hand. Since the end of May, that has meant writing a letter (in the form of a poem) to a different person every day, one day a male, one day female, back and forth for 240 days now. It's a tiring process, but it does get to your question at hand--or your point of conversation. It is not as if you're merely asking me questions anymore, so be sure you realize that.
What you call a "liberating shackle" is what I'd call a constraint, what we used to call little more than poetic form or prosody. So just as a certain rhyme scheme is a constraint, so is the decision you've made to create on sheets of paper 24 inches by 36 inches. That size holds you to its size (not much holding going on there there), but it also gives you certain freedoms and certain inspirations. Poets have generally dispensed with regular meter and rhyme, but they've replaced it with all manner of constraints, all of which promise something simple: opportunity.
A constraint is the germ of an idea absent the idea itself, yet it still works. Or it can work. Nothing is certain, and certainly not in poetry.
So what's the constraint in these letters I'm writing? Am I hewing closely to a certain style of writing? No, or at least I'm trying not to. I'm actually trying to write poems, to write letters, as different from each other as I can imagine them. So maybe one constraint is that I'm supposed to think up a new way to write a letter/poem ever day. But that really can't count, because I don't succeed at that, because the constraint is too vague. Can't I always argue one poem is different from another?
My constraint is a physical constraint, a temporal constraint, a test of stamina. I'm forced to write a poem every day, and a fairly long one, from three to twelve pages in length (though usually three, and occasionally even two). And I like that constraint. I cannot wait for inspiration. Instead, I have to create it every evening (for I usually write at night).
It is a hugely demanding process, physically and mentally. I just don't have the imagination for this, but I go on with it. I force myself to write when I'm tired, when I have no ideas, when I'm not sure who to write to. (And I should write one to you, but I'm not sure it makes sense to.) And sometimes I say to myself that this will kill me. I've written 240 poems so far, just finished the latest one, so I have 125 to go, and that's a large number of poems to write in a year, let alone a few months.
By the end of this, I'll have a huge manuscript, something the size of a collected poems, yet it'll be only a small portion of my total output over my life. Probably 1300 manuscript pages in length. Too much for anyone to read. So it is, in a certain sense, a conceptual practice. The poems are too numerous to be read, or even appreciated if they are read, so the project exists as an example of mania, and it is understood in a fragmentary way. Those who receive letters read their own letters, and understand that small part of the project. Only a very few people have read them all. This is an unpublishable book, and that's one reason why I post every poem as I write it.
And you'll be happy to know that all of these poems are not textual poems. Some of them are visual poems. Some are sound poems based on scores I present online. They cover a range.
I get them done only because I work on them diligently, only because I've always been able to ignore the physical to complete whatever intellectual or physical project I want to finish. I'm stubborn, and this is a project, a program, maybe a life, born out of stubbornness. I'm stubborn enough to be writing this to you from an airplane, and I've already written today's poem on this same flight, and already published online while I've been flying.
That way it can't be lost, even if this plane crashes. That is the secret of small pieces of paper covered with words: they can prove we were here and give people some sense of us even after we are dead.
I'm flying to a funeral now, so I'm thinking of the dead, but I don't work for the dead. I work for the living. I don't even work for the sake of a dead me. I work for the life of making something. It's the way you are. That's why I noted the ink under your fingernails that one time we met, why I noted the ink filling the whorls of a few of your fingerprints. The art is you. The need to make is in you. You cannot expel it.
When you try, all you do is make a poem.
ecr. l'inf.
No comments have been added yet.
