Hybrid Poetry - something old, something new

It's sometimes thought that poetry forms are dead in the States and that students can get literature and creative writing degrees without ever having to parse or write a sonnet. This may sometimes be true. It's certainly true that US poets working with forms were eclipsed by more fashionable schools towards the end of the 20th century

• L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry emerged in the 70s. The idea was that language should dictate meaning rather than the other way around. The movement was motivated by "mistrust of the spurious authority of the confessional voice", but also a mistrust in lyricism and grammar - e.g. N. NourbeSe Philip "saw the lyric voice as one of the tools used to further the ends of colonialism". The Language poets broke sentences into disjointed phrases and broke phrases into words in order to cleanse language of corruption and banality. Lyn Hejinian tells us that this poetry "invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierachies". Here's an example - the end of Bernstein's 6 page "Dysraphism" (dysraphism is an abstruse medical term meaning a kind of birth defect) -

      Dominion demands distraction - the circus
      ponies of the slaughter home. Braced
      by harmony, bludgeoned by decoration
      the dream surgeon hobbles three steps over, two
      steps beside. "In those days you didn't have to
      shout to come off as expressive." One by one
      the clay feet are sanded, the sorrows remanded.
      A fleet of ferries, forever merry.
      Show folks know that what the fighting man wants
      is to win the war and come home. 
  

  According to Jed Rasula, "Language poetry ... seems to have nourished poetic practice in marked nondenominational ways". It had a good publicity machine, and the time was ripe for a shake-up - the language aspect of poetry was becoming neglected.

• Elliptical Poetry - This term dates from 1998. According to Burt "Elliptical poets try to manifest a person - who speaks the poem and reflects the poet - while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves. They are post-avant-gardist, or post-'postmodern' ... Elliptical poems shift drastically between low (or slangy) and high (or naively 'poetic') diction ... The poets tell almost-stories, or almost-obscured ones. They are sardonic, angered, defensively difficult, or desperate; they want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television." Here's an example by Kleinzahler

      Ah, Little Girl Destiny, it's sprung a leak
      and the margins are bleeding themselves away.
      You and I and the vase and stars won't stay still.
      Wild, wild, wild - kudzu's choked the topiary. 
  
      Looks like your history is about to turn
      random and brutal, much as an inch of soil or duchy.
      Not at all that curious hybrid you had in mind.
      Jane Austen, high-tech and a measure of Mom. 
  

Both of these movements distrusted "the lyrical I" and sincere, anecdotal poetry. They're reactions to two influential (and restrictive) US trends

• New Criticism - Rational and analytical, this dominated the educational world for a while. "The ideal poem in New Critical terms was self-contained, refined, precisely formed, detached, and difficult in the sense that it required, and rewarded, careful study" (Cole Swensen)
• The mainstream - "the [mainstream] work appears spoken in a natural voice; there must be a sense of urgency and immediacy to this 'affected naturalness' so as to make it appear that one is re-experiencing the original event; there must be a 'studied artlessness' that gives a sense of spontaneous personal sincerity; and there must be a strong movement toward emphatic closure" (Charles Altieri)

Paul Otremba writes that "By the 1990s, with the rise of feminist, Marxist, and poststructuralist theories, American poets were becoming self-conscious about the ideological implications of their medium, particularly lyric poetry's participation in upholding a patriarchal tradition and a belief in the "transcendental signified" ... this materialist opposition comes from a perception of lyric's 'imperial assertion of self, the programmatic exclusion of otherness or difference, and the logocentric quest for presence' "

According to Cole Swensen (in "American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry") "American poetry finds itself at a moment when idiosyncrasy rules to such a degree and differences are so numerous that distinct factions are hard, even impossible, to pin down". Hannah Brooks-Motl confirms this, saying that "in the last few decades or so, American poetry hasn't needed to worry about combating or complicating its mainstream because it hasn't had one." It's just one school amongst many ("The School of Quietude" according to Ron Silliman).

Meanwhile in the USA a "New Formalism" movement grew, reviving interest in forms. The poets started magazines and produced anthologies. They sometimes didn't get on well with those in the other 2 movements who sometimes considered them right-wing, naive, and old fashioned. But Form wasn't dismissed entirely. Lyn Hejinian in "Moving Borders" wrote

• "Can form make the primary chaos ... articulate without depriving it of its capacious vitality, its generative power? Can form go even further than that and actually generate that potency, opening uncertainty to curiosity, incompleteness to speculation, and turning vastness into plentitude? In my opinion the answer is yes"
• "Writing's forms are not merely shapes but forces, too; formal questions are about dynamics ... Form does not necessarily achieve closure, nor does raw materiality provide openness"

And some Language poets were feeling less radical - e.g. Bob Perelman in "Assembling Alternatives" wrote

• "I want to make a case for syntactic and rhetoric effects which have been systematically denigrated in Language writing"
• "I want to make the case that contact with familiar social structures in language is a crucial element for politically and poetically ambitious work"

Hybrid poetry arrived, supposedly combining the best of both worlds. "Today's hybrid poem might engage such conventional approaches as narrative that presumes a stable first-person, yet complicate it by disrupting the linear temporal path or by scrambling the normal syntactical sequence. Or it might foreground recognizably experimental modes such as illogicality or fragmentation, yet follow the strict formal rules of a sonnet or a villanelle. Or it might be composed entirely of neologisms but based in ancient traditions. Considering the traits associated with 'conventional' work, such as coherence, linearity, formal clarity, narrative, firm closure, symbolic resonance, and stable voice, and those generally assumed of 'experimental' work, such as non-linearity, juxtaposition, rupture, fragmentation, immanence, multiple perspective, open form, and resistance to closure, hybrid poets access a wealth of tools" (Cole Swensen).

So what does the resulting poetry look like? There's much variety. Here's part of a sonnet by Karen Volkman (from "American Poets in the 21st Century")

    Lifting whither, cycle of the sift
    annuls the future, zero that you zoom
    beautiful suitor of the lucent room
    evacuating auras, stratal shift

    leaping in its alabaster rift.
    Lend the daylight crescent, circle, spume,
    ether from your eye, appalled perfume,
    ash incense to boundary when you drift

    ...

I think this is an acrostic ("la belle absente").

Over-reaction and exaggeration are understandable in times of war, but the some of the arguments I quoted by Hejinian et al seem to me disprovable by experiment and disrespectful to readers - the analogies are wild and the theories don't match the execution. N. NourbeSe Philip went on to say that she's "far more interested in working with the structure of the language to destabilize the image of the daffodil" (she was brought up in the tropics and was taught Wordsworth) but the way she does it -

   Is not a daffodil
   is
   and not
   is-

just doesn't work for me; the image isn't stable in the first place, and besides, there are many other ways to make the point nowadays. Perhaps it's best to ignore the theory and focus on the poetry itself. To me however, Volkman's poem combines the worst of both worlds.

Fuselit 15: Tilt

I've not seen this magazine before. Fuselit this time is hand-bound with orange ribbon and has a cover of 'jugshi tsasho' handmade paper from Bhutan, holed like a pinball table. It comes with a mini-CD and a bonus A6 booklet. Let's deal first with the bonus booklet - "Dr Fulminare's Bardgames". It involves game rules (for Dominoes, etc - my favorite is Jenga) translated so that they can be used to produce poems. I tried to assess the rules and the resulting poems together. The Domino rules were too loose (the poems ok) and the Scrabble rules too tight (a miracle that the poems exist at all). The Old Maid rules are just right, though I think the poem might have been stronger. I'm tempted.

Oulipo has various offshoots - Oucuipo (CUIsine), etc - but there seems to be no Oujeupo, which is rather a surprise given the Oulipo interest in chess. I think this booklet is a worthy contribution to the field.

Some of the poets in Fuselit have had books published by Penguin and Simon & Schuster. There's a surprisingly wide range: abba rhyme; shaped; haiku; a dialog; a 19 line poem where each line starts with the word "tilt"; and Nicelle Davis' "Disclaimer ..." which has a bit of everything - successfully so.

Is this the shape of things to come (either round or A6, but always holed)? As e-mags take over, perhaps paper magazines will need to flaunt their materiality in this way.

Fragmentation and continuity

In this article I'm looking at continuity and fragmentation, both in prose and poetry. The two properties co-exist in most texts, though their intensity and type might vary.

Broken Mirrors

When a text seems fragmentary there are several points to consider. Firstly, is the text mimetic? Underneath the surface disruption is there a represented world? If so

• At what level does the disruption occur? Are words disrupted (Finnegans Wake)? Are there discontinuities between sentences? Or are there ruptures only when a chapter ends (Sartre's "Le Sursis")?
• What types of interference are there? - Grammatical? Tonal? Point-of-view? Visual? Sonic? Temporal (flashbacks, etc)? Narrational (flicking between story-lines)?
• How easily is the underlying story reconstructed? Episodic pieces might have gaps that can't be confidently filled, but that might not cause problems as long as readers can join the dots.

The author may introduce disruption for several reasons

• Employing the aesthetics of conciseness, omitting all non-essentials (and even a few continuity cues)
• To make perception harder ("The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged" - Shklovsky, "Art as Technique"
• To pack more into the text at the cost of surface clarity (as in Ulysses, which uses most of the methods of disruption listed above)

By disrupting linearity authors may be attempting to produce a more realistic rendition of how they think we perceive the world. However, reading is a special type of perception. According to Charney and Johnson-Eilola "we always read linearly and sequentially even if (1) the text presents information in a non-chronological fashion, and (2) the reader chooses the order of that sequence ... readers of hypertexts process network texts in much the same way as they would a text in print; that is, they store information in hierarchies even if they are reading in a user-determined order ... since the mind cannot import textural structure directly into long-term memory, the resemblance of a hypertextual structure to long-term memory is irrelevant"

Flattened Hierarchies

But maybe there is no underlying represented "reality" that can be pieced together. Maybe there's no disruption - what you see is what you get. Once parataxis substantially replaces syntaxis "the dethronement of language and logic forms part of an essentially mystical attitude towards the basis of reality as being too complex and at the same time too unified, too much of one piece, to be validly expressed by the analytical means of orderly syntax and conceptual thought" (Martin Esslin, "The Theatre of the Absurd", 1962.)

It's been suggested that "poetic effect [is] the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures." (D.Sperber and D.Wilson, "Relevance"). This effect can be achieved by having many secondary meanings and by disrupting the usually foregrounded vehicles of sense (syntax, meaning, etc), making cracks so that the secondary effects can bubble up.

Secondary effects may develop a net of interconnections - leitmotifs. The idea of a decentralised network of ideas has been described by Deleuze and Guattari ('rhizomes') but of course goes back much further than that - "The governing principle of much Persian poetry is circular rather than linear; rather than a logically sequential progression, a poem is seen as a collection of stanzas interlinked by symbol and image - the links being patterns of likeness and unlikeness, of repetition and variation - which 'hover', as it were, around an unspoken centre" (Glyn Pursglove, Acumen 25).

Montage and Collage are non-hierarchical ways of incorporating diverse fragments to produce a multicentred work, as are list poems. Gregory Ulmer described collage as "the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century". This may be because it cuts across the long-cherished Aristotelian notion of organic unity, where each component of a work is a necessary part of a whole. Max Ernst claimed that "Collage is a hypersensitive and rigorously exact instrument, a seismograph capable of registering the exact potentialities of human welfare in every epoch". In relation to poetry, David Antin remarked "for better or worse, 'modern' poetry in English has been committed to a principle of collage from the outset".

The rich mesh of association may well predominate over any particular fragment or pair of fragments. With collage in particular, use is made of the difference between the source/material of the fragment and the meaning in the context of the whole - the observer is expected to bob up and down between surface and depth. Poetry as compared with prose tends to foreground the media (i.e. it's more collage than montage). Forms have evolved which optimally use sound to disrupt syntax - "Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer" (John Constable, PN Review 159).

Breaking up is hard to do

Whether by design or not, readers will seek connections. Juxtaposition happens in all texts. On a small scale juxtaposing can happen on a line and can be read as an implicit (though perhaps surreal) simile. "In Surrealist metaphor, two terms are juxtaposed so as to create a third which is more strangely potent than the sum of the parts ... The third term forces an equality of attention onto the originating terms", (Geoff Ward, "Statutes of Liberty"). If there is doubt, something novel may appear in this gap. Eliot and Pound spoke of "emotion" in this context, but more likely some surreal image or blend may appear.

Juxtaposed items may be similar in some ways (shared subject matter) and different in others (register, point-of-view). Sections and sentences can come alternately from 2 fields - in Henry Reed's 'The Naming of Parts' for example, the reported speech and internal thought alternate. 'Moby Dick' and 'USA' (Dos Passos) contain inserted non-fictional fragments. Found text can be inserted randomly into a poem, or fragments of different kinds of poems (rhymed and free-form) can be interspliced using a variation of Burroughs' cut-ups technique. Bakhtin's carnival and polyphony can come into play too.

In disrupted works there may be some narrative or an advertised hierarchical structure, but it's provisional and may exist more to aid the initial reading phase than to model the underlying conceptual structure. It may even be there to distract attention from where the real power resides ("The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be ... to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him", T.S. Eliot). Connections between parts may be more to do with surface than meaning - leitmotifs without a plot. In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" there's a common theme. In "The Waste Land" the links are more tenuous. In other works fragments are only related in that they each mention a red dress, or an accordian, or have someone shouting "Damn". These latter relationships can seem gratuitious, leading to "washing line" pieces (where the only point of the connection is to have somewhere to hang the pieces from) but this is to devalue the surface, which in collage is more relevant than usual. Without narrative impetus or suspense "thematic interplay" can become the poor man's "conflict and dynamism", a "compare and contrast" task that requires too much from the reader and masks the authorial persona.

Getting together again

When given 2 phrases or parts, the assumptions readers might make to connect the parts (and fill in gaps) include

• Temporal continuity. In
     "Goodbye", he said, rinsing his cup before putting it in the sink.
     The roads were busy that evening
  readers can fill the gap in (the character left the house and drove off?).
• Causal connection. In
     "Does Dave like porridge?"
     "All Scots like porridge!"
  we can easily deduce that Dave is Scottish.
• Common subject. The parts might belong to a group (a description for example) where order isn't especially important. Fragments might be interpreted as an incomplete whole; the Gestalt might easily be completed. Just as in a painting some standard details might be left unfinished or unpainted, so in a "show don't tell" narrative the reader might easily fill in the unspoken detail.

When we come to a fracture in a longer text (between paragraphs, chapters, etc) we still try to make a connection between the parts. The way we do this will vary according to the type of text we're reading, but typically I suspect we first assume that the text is jumping ahead in time or place, leaving a gap that will be filled in later. Then perhaps we might think it's a flashback, or a parallel storyline that will be revisited. Only as a last resort do we concede that there may be no causal connection or character continuity.

The nature and amount of continuity between juxtaposed items affects the dynamics of reading

• Narrative continuity (but other types of continuity too) provides forward motion
• Juxtaposition produces a suspension, saving the current detail (which can't yet be processed or interpreted) so it can be used later, inducing formal tension: "Spatial Form (modernist poetics) gives unity to a literary work by a pattern of interconnected motifs that can only be perceived by 'reading over'" (Lodge, "The Art of Fiction"); "Modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity" ( Frank, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature")
• Grouping implies a pause to gather and integrate descriptive detail (to look around). Unlike juxtaposition, the material in the group can be summarised - as a mood perhaps, or object; the raw components needn't be retained.

Examples

Here are some examples of contested continuity, showing the different levels at which disruption can occur, and how different types of continuity might cover the cracks.

• A good woman
  This morning, as I gaze down from the window into the courtyard garden, the sight of the sprouting crocuses and fat daffodil shoots makes me long for the country. I pull on my boots and jacket and head for the Luxenbourg Garden. Hardly the country, but at least there will be the flowers I am so good at naming.
  
  On the way I pause at a travel agent's and look at posters. A cheetah lopes through long grass. A lion yawns regally, balancing himself on a tree-trunk. Masai-Mara, the pictures announce. Sunsets in Siam, reads the script above a group of men raking rice as white as snow in a peaceful paddy field. Golden beaches.

  By Lisa Appignanesi. An extract from a mainstream novel. It's a narrative, but there's little movement: two descriptions (during which the narrator is still and passively perceiving) are separated by brief action - it's almost a slide-show - Paris vs Africa.

• Passing
  Down Dove Street, the silence is growing in the air like crystals; the foxes hate it, and they're straining their huge kite ears, but there's no sound at all but the slow, slow breathing of the city, and the feet and the drip and pat of raining. They bear left at the joke shop, where a reeking litter bin marks the corner. There's a dropped five pound note lying in a puddle, folded in the wet like cloth

  By Padrika Tarrant. An extract from a short story where continuity overrides fragmentation. The narrative is clear but not overwhelming. Take it away and you don't quite have a "sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table" (Lautreamont), but crystals, foxes, kites, rain, a joke shop, and a five pound note are forced into unnatural proximity. Metaphors, jokes and lists are other ways to bring disparate element together in prose, the narrative a stealth mechanism. In prose the interruptions can be naturally introduced by a person interrupting a stream-of-consciousness.

• A Visit to Aunt Flo
  Kate is a red geranium and Mary Jo a marigold. But you are the stuff of which thistledown is made. Light and silky. Here and gone.
  
  You have a name, same as the others do. Only it doesn't stick so well. It gets dispersed. It gets blown away onto the rag-doll and takes root there. Ellen Jane is hugged to suffocation and then discarded in the toy-box. Her legs over her head, a consignment of brick dumped on her back.
  
  'Ellen, put your coat on'. Mumma holds it wide, its lining smooth as silk, a paler brown than the outer shell.
  
  You saw the coalman framed in the kitchen window carrying a sack. You saw the way his face looked. You picked up the pillow and you were the coalman carrying the sack.

  By Jane Woods (Writing Women 10/3). The start of some episodic prose. There's a mimetic interruption between paragraphs 2 and 3, then an interruption caused by a change of scene between 3 and 4. There's continuity within paragraph so perhaps readers will assume continuity between them. The text supports this reading, so the fragmentation shouldn't pose a problem for traditional readers.

• Pisgah
  How a fox ran under my horse's legs one day out on the Ranges and I didn't dare shout View Halloo. I watched it run through the grass and away till my cousin Erica saw it and shouted.
  
  The father's photographs of his parents, dead in the year I was born, high on the wall above a shelf in the breakfast room.
  
  The changing light over the watercress beds at Sherrington.
  
  How I was ill and broke a fruit bowl, and when I confessed to my mother she smiled and soothed and I confessed some more and she still smiled and I went on confessing.

  By Simon Burt (New Writing 3) - There's fracture between paragraphs in this extract from several pages of similar prose. It's a montage (slide-show) of conventional stills and short narratives. The lack of over-arching narrative will trouble some readers.

• Pirates appear only at transitional moments
  "Have you been jumping in & out
  of the dressing-up box?" asked
  Alice. Stereotyping doesn't help
  but talking about the actual
  experience usually does the trick.
  Under the placid surface of her
  life there was a dark undercurrent
  of fear. Have you ever used your
  mouth to make a percussive sound?
  

  By Steve Spense (Tears in the Fence 51) - There's fracture between sentences. This is the 1st stanza of a poem. As far as I can see, the line-breaks are procrustian (Procrustes would force his guests to fit into the beds he gave them) but they don't disrupt because they're so easily ignored. Sentences are intact, and could easily come from 4 different domains, but there are connections - pirates and dressing-up; therapy and exercises.

• Inserting the Mirror
  To explore the nature of rain I opened the door because inside the workings of language clear vision is impossible. You think you see, but are only running your finger through public hair. The rain was heavy enough to fall into this narrow street and pull shreds of cloud down with it. I expected the drops to strike my skin like a keyboard. But I only got wet. When there is no resonance, are you more likely to catch a cold? Maybe it was the uniform appearance of the drops which made their application to philosophy so difficult even though the street was full of reflection.

  By Rosmarie Waldrop. There's fracture between phrases. This is part of a prose poem where the sentences are correct grammatically, but have semantic shifts. There's a continuity of theme, and even a progressive argument. Waldrop wrote that "Perhaps the greatest challenge of the prose poem (as opposed to 'flash fiction') is to compensate for the absence of the margin. I try to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text. I cultivate cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference, etc. 'Gap gardening,' I have called it, and my main tool for it is collage"

• Finnegans Wake
  That the fright of his light in tribalbalbutience hides aback in the doom of the balk of the deaf but that the height of his life from a bride's eye stammpunct is when a man that means a mountain barring his distance wades a lymph that plays the lazy winning she likes yet that pride that bogs the party begs the glory of a wake while the scheme is like your rumba round me garden, allatheses, with perhelps the prop of a prompt to them, was now or never in Etheria Deserta, as in Grander Suburbia, with Finnfannfawners, ruric or cospolite, for much or moment indispute.

  By James Joyce - There's fracture between letters though there's stylistic continuity. This is part of a novel where there may be an underlying (albeit dream) narrative.

• Rich in Vitamin C
  Under her brow the snowy wing-case
        delivers truly the surprise
  of days which slide under sunlight
            past loose glass in the door
        into the reflection of honour spread
  through the incomplete, the trusted. So
        darkly the stain skips as a livery
  of your pause like an apple pip,
        the baltic loved one who sleeps.
  
  By J.H. Prynne - The start of a poem. Procrustian, ignorable line-breaks and indentation, but now the sematics are vulnerable. A "wing-case" (of a lady-bird for example) could be eyelid-shaped. A glance could surprise, or a blink could be the result of a surprise, but the syntactic sugar doesn't mend the semantic rupture for me.

Rejection

But perhaps some fragments should remain disconnected, at least for a while

• "At the outset, it is only liking, not understanding, that matters. Gaps in understanding ... are not only important, they are perhaps even welcome, like clearings in the woods, the better to allow the heart's rays to stream out without obstacle. The unlit shadows should remain obscure, which is the very condition of enchantment", Breton
• "[Forrest-Thompson's] concept of suspended naturalisation - the resistance to that urge to 'reduce the strangeness' - undoubtedly owes its origins to Keats's concept of negative capability, 'when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason'".

Perhaps some fragments need to remain alien

• "Just as an alien body falling into a supersaturated solution causes the precipitation of crystals, i.e., reveals the true structure of the dissolved substance, the "alien word" [citations, etc] by its incompatibility with the structure of the text activates that structure", Yury Lotman, "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Ardis, 1976, p.109

Poetry Punctuation

Moved to http://litrefsarticles.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/poetry-punctuation.html

Why Blog?

The Past

Over the last 27 years I've used many methods to broadcast work and communicate with writers. Here are some starting dates and comments

1983: Face-to-face workshops	These seems as popular as ever, though competition from the WWW might have narrowed the variety of people who attend.
1983: Performance	Norwich, Nottingham, Cambridge
1987: Printed Magazines	These continue much as before - even the letters pages with their turn-around time of months don't seem too affected by the Web. But the current recession may take its toll on printed magazines.

Then I started using computers

1987: Usenet (rec.arts.poems)	This continues on Google Groups. Then as now it's unmoderated, which limits its usefulness. It's been superceded by functionally similar Web Forums.
1989: E-mail-mediated workshop	More private but by today's standards not user-friendly.

Then the Web arrived. Web magazines are in abundance, but the better ones perform much the same role as their printed counterparts (cheaper for submitters though, and less money for editors). Other uses of the medium emerged

1993: Web sites Litrefs and, later, Love the Poet	Ticking over. Top pages in Jan 2010 were Metaphor and Simile (1649 hits), Translating Dante (884 hits), and Getting your poetry published (880 hits)
2001: WWW-mediated workshop	Moderated
2007: YouTube	I have a few poetry videos on YouTube
2007: Facebook	I glance at this weekly for invitations and announcements. The communication there seems mostly phatic and ephemeral to me.

I've never used Twitter. I've never published podcasts on iTunes (though I considered it once), and I've only added a few sentences to Wikipedia.

The Present

In December 2009 I started a blog, just when Stephen Fry, Rob MacKenzie (Surroundings), and others were cutting back on web emissions. Why?

• Interblogability - Other bloggers are more likely to find it than my web site, and they're more likely to respond. Since I've been duplicating articles on my blog and website I've noticed that it's the blog versions that get mentioned in Tweets, etc. I also find that having a blog makes visiting other blogs easier.
• Freedom - Being a non-work-based facility there are fewer restrictions on the material I can post.
• Web 2.0 features - Users have come to expect social networking features. Blogging software has improved lately, and supplies them.

Some people use blogging software because it's the only way they can put things online. Nowadays that's not restrictive - blogging software's developed into site-management sofware, so blogware can be used for magazine publications nowadays. That said, blogs remain by default time-sequence-based, and items disappear from sight (posts get compacted into months, and months into years), which is why I duplicate info on the WWW so that I can categorise and structure it. If something's worth saying, it's worth keeping - news that stays news. However, with tags, gadgets and sophisticated searches old posts needn't be lost, and blogs are providing other ways to do what structure provides for a traditional web site so I may eventually relegate my web site to being a back-up site.

Blogs come in so many shapes and sizes that it's hard to decide whether a page is a blog let alone a good blog. Here's a list of sites that I like and sites that are generally popular

• Personal Blogs - Silliman's Blog (Blogger) is internationally popular, opinionated, informative, often mentioned in the other universe of print, and responsive to comments. It's confirmation that "blog" is a verb as well as a noun. The Truth About Lies (Blogger - Jim Murdoch) is another literary blog - essay-length posts with a podcast option. Less purely literary (but the writers' lives are so tied up with literature that it makes little difference) are Baroque in Hackney (Wordpress - Katy Evans-Bush; mentioned in "Time Out"!), George Szirtes (Blogger - a major poet, but also a good journal writer), TaniaWrites (Blogger - Tania Hershman; 91 followers, and pages of value to writers - The Short Review, UK prose mags, etc) and Venessa Gebbie (Blogger)
• Magazines - Everyday Fiction prints a story a day. Readers can add comments, and there's a rating system plus Forums. Various print publications have blog offshoots - Magma, Harriet (WordPress? Poetry Foundation) and The Guardian come to mind.
• Sites - Bookslut is often mentioned in best-of blogrolls. It combines topical and reference material with adverts, but lacks some typically bloggy features.

The Future

I started drafting this article a few weeks ago. Since then, Adrian Slater's written Literary Communications where he writes that "the blog and online magazine used to complement the offline publishing world - I get the feeling that they're both sinking a little together". Perhaps so.

I can understand why blogs get abandoned. Budding authors are advised to start blogs so that agents notice them. Authors about to publish books are advised to promote the book in a blog. And some people start a blog like they would a diary as a New Year's resolution. Blogs that are started for these reasons aren't likely to last long. Other authors look upon their sites as providing an information service to the writing community, which may result in pressure to keep material up-to-date, to keep publishing (I've seen people apologise on their blogs for not posting recently. Why?). Some bloggers may feel that they're in competition with their peers and develop deadline anxiety. Eventually, some bloggers (especially when they see the access statistics) may wonder if all the effort's worthwhile: without income, purpose or loyal readership the effort's not sustainable.

I don't think I'll suffer from such pressures (if nothing else my web pages have longevity), but I'm unsure what role my blog will play. Perhaps this uncertainty is more wide-spread, and is a factor in some blogs' decline - is a blog a soapbox, personal journal, self-publishing on-the-cheap, a place to post drafts for comments, a discussion forum, a magazine, or a filing system for interesting URLs? Is it mostly static or mostly ephemeral? Of course, it can be any of these things, but sometimes while trying to do too much a site can lose focus and audience.

What you spend your time on depends on your post/read ratio, the amount of filtering you're prepared to do, the importance you attach to archiving and sorting your posts, whether you use smart-phones or computers, whether you combine poetry with socialising, etc. It also depends on what those you contact use.

I expect to use the blog for literary purposes - drafting articles, making topical announcements, and advertising items from other blogs. I'll post every week or so (I can post revised files from my website if I run out of ideas). I'll mention the blog in bios. I'll use the website to store static information for posterity, and I'll use Facebook for making announcements as well as making/receiving invitations. If you want to turn up to all the launches, sign the petitions, and be the first to hear about deaths, prize-winners, etc, then you need at least Facebook. If you're happy to let the dust settle first then you don't need Twitter.

Transparency, Barthelme and Lahiri

I've been reading Jhumpa Lahiri's short story collection "Unaccustomed Earth" recently, along with "Donald Barthelme" (by Lois Gordon) and "Reading Network Fiction" by David Ciccoricco. First I'll mention some general language features, then I'll compare the writers. In some aspects they're opposites though I like them both.

Language

• Knowledge of, and skill with, words isn't a sufficient condition for understanding the world. In itself it's not even a necessary condition. We learn by doing, by writing. Learning leads to new instruments, new worlds. The Word and World inform each other. For writers in particular, words are not passive mediators.
• The Self isn't a separate layer either. It needs to be added into the mix. The "World -> Self (Author) -> Word" pipeline is misleading. There are eddies and backflows. Authors write in order to understand.
• The Reader needs to be added into the mix. The "World -> Author -> Words -> Reader" pipeline is misleading. There are interactions between the elements. The words that are read by the reader are given meaning by a world the author might not share, or an opinion of the author that the author might reject.
• When these elements interact there are terms of engagement: rules, conventions, games. People can
  • make-believe that a layer is transparent, that in an interaction between 2 elements, one dominates.
  • swap layers. Metaphors can be taken literally; puns can be a factory for producing new items; a single Word (or Interpretation) can generate many possible Worlds;
  • switch between layers. Done inappropriately it may make a character seem schitzoid, or it may lead to humour.

Transparency and Immersion

• Is transparency good? - "It is by no means apparent that medial transparency is or should be the measure of a successful narrative ... often a message is conveyed only through the interplay between a story and the story-producing mechanism" (Ciccoricco, p.118)
• Is immersion dependant on transparency? - "Common to the discourse of immersion theory is the notion that the realist novelist and the virtual reality environment designer pursue the same goal - the disappearance of the medium [but this] conflates immersion in representation (as in a Victorian novel) ... with immersion in simulation (as in a VR environment)" (Ciccoricco, p.119)
• Are there other forms of immersion? - "Ryan identifies three forms that fall under a 'poetics of immersion': spatial, where the reader develops a sense of being at the scene of narrated events; temporal, where the reader is caught up in narrative suspense; and emotional" (Ciccoricco, p.121)

Barthelme

There isn't much word-play in his work. Certainly he doesn't smash the words into letters. The words are tokens that may switch meanings (often by their context changing) but they don't lose their internal integrity. His pieces have structural variety though he plays few games with narrative (his pieces don't always have a narrative to play with). There are few multi-framed stories, mobius-band pieces, or circular works.

His characters don't say funny things though they can be wistful and resigned. His humour is more to do with tonal mismatches and juxtapositions of the ridiculous or fantastic and the banal. There are other shifts too, "from myth or old-fashioned fairy-tale prose to modern psychologese, or from mock-epic diction to comic-book slang - or from the inflated platitudes of political, philosophical, or academic jargon to hip advertising lingo" (Gordon). "Typically his work moves in and out of reality, from the concrete to the abstract, from moral characterisation, the allegorical and mythic, to the most extreme manipulations of metaphor and description, and the creation of new grammar and words." (Gordon). Different aesthetics operate within the same work. To take an analogy from art, imagine looking at a painting of a landscape. On the horizon you see what looks like a yellow rectangle. You wonder if it's a building or a lorry, but it could be a yellow rectangle, there to contrast with the shape and colour of the setting sun. In places the canvas has been left bare.

He foregrounds language rather than words. At times language becomes opaque, the category difference between "apple" and an apple dissolving. Words are his "real toads" in imaginary gardens. He "literalizes the metaphors of life as war and love as soap opera. His focus is not so much the precariousness of what is traditionally considered reality or fantasy, but [..] the way in which our lives are saturated and ultimately defined by the media" (Gordon). And yet, themes show through the flattened significance of signs - fatherhood, sad marriages (he had 4 marriages), the futility of war (he arrived in Korea on the last day of war).

Here's the start of "The Indian Uprising" - We defended the city as best we could. The arrows of the Comanches came in clouds. The war clubs of the Comanches clattered on the soft, yellow pavements. There were earthworks along the Boulevard Mark Clark and the hedges had been laced with sparkling wire. People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. 'Do you think this is a good life?' The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. 'No.'

Given the problems with identifying the place and era, I suspect spatial and temporal immersion is unlikely, though there's hope on the emotional front.

Gordon writes that later in the story "A key line, which occurs after three pages, establishes at least three different perspectives: "but it is you I want now, here in the midst of this Uprising .... It is when I am with you that I am happiest. ... 'Call off your braves'" This alerts us to the fact that (1) although up until now we thought the war real and indeed the subject of the story, (2) the lovers in fact may not only be witnessing or participating in the flming of of war, most importantly, (3) everything we have read up until now ... may simply be the speaker's reactions (in film terms) to his frustration ... only in his mind, ... he can only respond to experience as an actor on a [Hollywood] set"

Reading a Barthelme piece one has to decide to be an active reader or give up. The diction and genre of a section may not match the content. Lovers may be locked inside a discourse more suited to weather forecasting or art criticism. Readers need to keep their perspectives open and normalise at their peril - his pieces are not "really about" something else.

Lahiri

I think her language aspires to transparency, and I think the plotting does too. But sometimes cracks show

• In the title story of the collection a daughter greets her father after an absense of several months. "He had not lost weight and the hair on his head was plentiful, more so, she feared, than her own after Akash's birth, when it had fallen out in clumps ... her bathtub was still filled with shampoos that promised to stimulate scalp growth, plump the shafts. Her father looked well rested, another quality Ruma did not possess these days. She'd taken to applying concealer below her eyes ..." (p.12).
  The character is having thoughts at moments convenient for the author who's hoping to bury an info-dump by interleaving the information. The spell of immersion is broken by the distant clatter of a keyboard.
• Narration and plotting isn't crucial to her style; mechanisms tend to be kludgey or repeated. In the title story for example, we have a visiting parent (a topic she's covered elsewhere). College life and families are never far away. The idea of the child's garden seemed a little odd - a MacGuffin as much as a grandfatherly indulgence. The use of the postcard at the end works symbolically (the child wanting it to "grow") but would the child really have taken the postcard?

For me the transparency doesn't lead to immersion because there's too little interest generated (or maybe too few types of interest). Branches in the plot can be anticipated, following well-trodden paths, and they're well separated, giving time to guess what will happen next. Emotionally I'm told what to feel. I'm more spatially than temporally engaged - objects and interiors are carefully described and India/US differences are attended to. Big journeys mean big changes - any deviation from that pattern tends to carry significance.

Clear as ink

Lahiri's reliable. Like a lawyer she presents paragraphs of facts when making a point, hoping to convince by sheer volume of evidence. You'll know what's important because you'll be told and shown- "Why?" In her son's small face she saw the disappointment she also felt. "Daddy's coming back tonight", she said, trying to change the subject. "Should we make a cake?" (p.57).

Barthelme's more hit-and-miss, but that in the nature of the game he plays. He too cares about getting the words right (he re-wrote pieces even after publication), but he doesn't polish his prose so that you can always see right through it. Language becomes a character in his stories: moody, stubborn, playful - not transparent, not a cardboard cut-out.

I'm not asking for everything to be a symbol, or for stories to be difficult, or for writers to exhibit ability in several styles (I like Proust's work). But I think Barthelme plays his game better than she plays hers. I'm just glad I'm not a judge having to assess two such entries.

Eliot and Cinema

The following letter published in a recent issue of Acumen was a response to an article by William Oxley. It seems to me and others that "The Waste Land" uses ArtHouse cinematic techniques - cross-cutting, panning, juxtaposition, etc - yet Eliot saw little else but newsreels, Cowboy films and Slapstick. I suppose nowadays "The Simpsons", "24", "Flashforward", "The Office" and in particular pop videos provide a similar education.

In Acumen 65 William Oxley wondered about Eliot and the development of cinema. I can see several connections. During the early 1900s silent movies were already using cross-cutting, rapid point-of-view changes, and flashes of symbolism. Talkies gave directors an easy option - to tell rather than show. On the show-tell spectrum films range from Koyaanisqatsi through Distant Voices, Still Lives to The Shawshank Redemption's voice-over, but most films are well towards the "tell" end of the spectrum. Eisenstein's montage became Art-House, a distraction from the plot. Mainstream movies lost their visual roots, growing up only by leaving home.

Meanwhile, poetry experienced no corresponding technological revolution. If anything, it fed cross-culturally on the cinematic techniques that Talkies left behind - Imagist cross-cuts, etc. David Trotter concludes that Eliot's "understanding of film technique was thoroughly up-to-date, and a good deal more sophisticated than that shown by cinephile writers such as Franz Kafka" but he seemed worried about the mass-media aspects of the medium - "The essay in memory of Marie Lloyd published as the last of the Dial London Letters in December 1922 [was] unremittingly hostile to cinema".

Eliot alluded to cinema in a Waste Land manuscript and (like many contemporaries) adopted some of its techniques, supplemented by Tiresiasian voice-overs, low-life content (borrowed or stolen from French poetry, but also perhaps from newsreel footage) and literary learning, trying to shore things up as the moving image began to take over from the word. Eliot led admirers to the compromised land where they'd come and go amongst the paratactic ruins, making follies of them. Few followed the singular Eliot towards belief though. Instead, a confessional, self-doubting, psychotherapist generation turned back, dumping the 'Show not Tell' mantra in favour of 'Find Your Voice'. But poetry shouldn't be reduced to Pictionary, nor is it an Encounter Group where writers can find themselves and grow up at the expense of poetry. Too often nowadays, poems try to please all the tutors by not only showing and telling, but confessing too - annotated slide-shows where an anecdote concludes with a telling, self-revealing couplet.

The Waste Land appeared in 1922. In the decades before, Cubism had already distorted representation then Dada and Abstract art had finished the job off ("Writing is fifty years behind painting", wrote Brion Gysin). One can also find precursors of Eliot's decentred style further back - "The governing principle of much Persian poetry is circular rather than linear; rather than a logically sequential progression, a poem is seen as a collection of stanzas interlinked by symbol and image - the links being patterns of likeness and unlikeness, of repetition and variation - which 'hover', as it were, around an unspoken centre" (Glyn Pursglove, Acumen 25).

I don't think Eliot can be blamed for Jori Graham let alone lang-po or Flarf. Other forces were more committed to the dethronement of language and logic (absurdist theatre, minimalist and abstract art, etc). The factors that influenced Eliot affected many other poets too, even those who disliked Eliot's particular blend. If he's responsible at all, it's only because writers reacted against his conservatism and that of mainstream, commercialised cinema. His later work (like Einstein's) seems rather a cul-de-sac to me as many of his now forgotten imitators discovered.

"T. S. Eliot and Cinema", David Trotter ("Modernism/modernity" 13.2 (2006) 237-265)