On Wednesday 18 July 2001 07:23, you wrote:
> Hi Chris
g'day josephine
> So far I'm finding writing to a set format the equivalent of
> painting by numbers. I drew me up a table of ten columns
> (one per syllable) and fourteen lines - and then tried
> filling in the squares. Not good. Trying to squash the sense
> into a set line length and rhyme ending is excrutiating. I'm
> not even thinking about the beat.
Funny you should say this. I have from time to time experimented with a
similar method. I don't actually draw up the grid quite as you say but do use
it in my head and use my fingers to count syllables. I do this because I am
after a jerky sort of affect which is a-rhythmic. As for rhyme, I could try a
reference like _The Poet's Manual and Rhyming Dictionary_ F Stillman, Thames
and Hudson, 1966. It is a formal experiment which gets better each time I try
it. The advantages of having a tin ear! I am also trying to get around the
idea that the closing couplet should be a closure by making it an open gate
(or door) which flies away from the sonnet's problem posing. Perhaps a type
of anti-sonnet? Of course to produce such a sonnet I do need to know the
sonnet form. It also buys into ideas I have about sonnets as serial
narrative. That is, a sonnet as something which opens an infinite line of
flight rather then being a closed self contained form which answers the
question posed by the sonnet in the closing couplet.
> Picked up a copy of the Monkey's Mask from the Library
> yesterday - now i just need someone to fill me in on who is
> who.
Some gossip. . . Dot Porter was working on the Monkey's Mask while she was
teaching poetry writing at UTS. I was one of her students and she supervised
me in my final year undergrad Special Writing Project (name of subject) where
I too was working on ideas for a verse novel. While Dot was concerned with
the possibilities of narrative expressed in detective fiction I was
concerned with serial narratives, using Deleuze and Guattari _A Thousand
Plateaus_ and Deleuze's cinema books. (The theory lecturers couldn't help me
with serial naratives like Selby's _Last Exit to Brooklyn_ so I was force to
rely on D&G.) I was concerned with narrative as plateaus which can appear to
be discontinuous (like the film Bladerunner which does not use traditional
film narrative continuity) whereas Dot was concerned with narrative
continuity as it appeared to work in the detective novel. It produced a sort
of good productive tension which could be seen as paradox. I find the Monkey
book interesting, although I have some qualms about some parts of the
narrative structure employed. But I do think it has some very interesting
pointers about narrative poetry which are very different to the sort of verse
narratives Allen Wearn writes, for example. Dante's divine hell was also
important. It points to a sort of demonological narrative which is not
defined by realist structuralist narratologie. The episodic narrative in her
next verse novel, _What a Piece of Work_ I feel solves some of the
(potential) problems the narrative in Monkey presented.
and NO I did not sleep with her. . . the girlfriend would have slaughtered
me for starters. So as for who is who: it is all just fiction, pure fictional
artifice since fiction is artifice.
best
Chris Jones.
--
i live on the edge of the aussie outback
and go bush beyond email access
without knowing in advance
i don't ignore yr post
simply wait and i will reply
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