Mairead,
Could your dissertation be read as prose poem? I think Wittgenstein, who
also thought a lot about "as", was in a way proposing that *under certain
circumstances* the whole Philosophical Investigations might be understood as
a prose poem too-- which is interesting, inasmuch as he and his analytical
fellows take philosophy up to its pointiest and driest tip, and look what
happens: "poetry" ends up dribbling out all over the place (or seems as
though it does, at least to our "avant-garde").
The issue of prose vis a vis poetry is maybe not so much what happens
"inside" the text, but more what is going on outside and around it: The
Investigations, for example, has become "surrounded" by a particular reading
formation within the broader field of Poetry and thus has acquired a certain
powerful "poeticalness" for many of us (something Bertrand Russell would
probably have a good laugh about); when Michael Palmer writes "A field dark
with crows" (I think that's it, but that the wording doesn't really matter
is partly my point), it becomes a prose poem (a quite powerful one) by
virtue of the virtues of the book around and outside it.
None of this is original, obviously. I guess I'm asking, more than anything,
if there is anything "inside" first-level genres that make them "what they
are". And if there is, why is everyone still arguing after more than 2000
years about what those essential qualities should be?
Here is a section from the VeRT interview I mentioned with Leonard Brink and
Jono Schneider. Schneider also happens to have a brief essay in the issue of
Slope mentioned by Alison Croggon.
Seven Questions for UNTITLED's editors Leonard Brink and Jono Schneider:
1) What is so exciting about prose poetry? Why start a prose poetry
magazine?
Leonard:
Why start a literary magazine of any kind if not to promote and to provide
a forum for the kind of work one likes? I edited a magazine previously,
Inscape, that was much more eclectic. This time around I wanted something
more focused and that occupied a more definite space. If you're going to
advocate something it helps to take a stand that's articulate enough to
make sense to a readership that you're asking to subscribe to multiple
issues.
I don't mean the kind of articulation that occurs in manifestos, literary
theory, or "poetics" as such -- somehow Jono and I were able to agree on a
place to stand and we hope that the poems we publish articulate that
aesthetic.
Jono:
I like the dissolution of the line. The line is what makes poetry, on
the immediate surface, look like, or appear to be, poetry. And I'm excited
by
the surprise that happens in prose that goes against the look of prose. But
this
prose doesn't have to be "poetry" -- think of Beckett here, or Leslie
Scalapino's novels, like Orion or The Front Matter, Dead Souls.
Because prose is the default medium for writing, we have an unconscious
default mechanism for reading it, even if we know enough to separate genres
through what we expect them to do for us as readers. But there is no
expectation for prose poetry, I think, until the reading has begun - that's
when the
expectation begins to form. Or at least in the aesthetic we want to promote,
which would be a writing that turns at every corner, even when the corner is
the narrative thread that the writing is turning against.
2) Do you care to comment on the history of experimental prose? Is all
writing experimental? If you see the term "experimental" in three
sentences in a row, as you have just now, does it make you faintly sick? And
if
so, why?
Leonard:
We're kind of partial to the term "abstract," which is to say that
representational or narrative work doesn't turn us on too often -- I'd
rather go to the movies. Still, "experimental" is probably a more useful
term to describe the work we're interested in than "avant garde."
Jono:
I think the work of the modernists relative to prose -- Stein, Williams'
Kora in Hell, even Nietzsche -- has a lot for us in the way of style that I
want
the magazine to continue out into the future, to see how writing can keep
becoming new in some unseen form, even if that form looks like paragraph
blocks on a page. And language writers - Hejinian, Pereleman, Seaton - have
a lot for us. And the French New Novelists - Robbe-Grillet, Duras, Simon,
Sarraute. And Peter Handke and Edmond Jabes, and Maurice Blanchot.
These writers in particular - some of my personal favorites, though not
necessarily Leonard's - have presented challenges to the field of writing,
through style, through the question of who is speaking, through the
challenge to structure and form. So I think the alteration of the novel from
the
"external" world -- where things are happening -- to the internal world that
doubts itself -- where I don't know what's happening, but I think it's
happening to me, if I even exist - is a way of thinking across this history,
is a record of this history. That is, the map of the history of writing
leads to the writer in the room spilling words onto pages, and these words
point
out at the world, make a point of the world.
I don't worry about "experimental" in any other way than if I read
something that shows me something that I haven't seen about writing and the
art of prose. An experiment, as I see it, is something that is still
happening, that the writer is opening up through form.
Leonard:
I would also count Blanchot and Jabes among my personal favorites. As to
experimentation, there's nothing new under the sun. There are things
that stand in contrast to expectations. I think of John Ashbery as a prose
poet.
The French surrealists, too, had no argument with normative syntax. Rosmarie
Waldrop's trilogy is as good as anything that's ever been written in prose,
and
her translations of Edmond Jabes are classic. I think of J.H. Prynne as a
prose
poet. We're about to publish a book by Beth Anderson, who refuses the prose-
poet label...
3) Untitled has a wonderful energy and flamboyance, do you care to
comment on this? How does this observation strike you?
Jono:
Thanks! I mean, you can blame it's success on the writers in Issue #1,
who made it relatively easy to assemble a packet of energy. But I also think
this speaks to the fact that a mag of lesser known ideas on prose has a lot
to offer to the world of writing.
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