Dear Kent,

Whether or not my dissertation could be read as a prose poem, it is a
strange thing, a long and broadminded riff. The last thing I read before I
went into my defense was the preface to Philosophical Investigations: you
can imagine that Wittgenstein's last sentences heartened me: "I should have
liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is
past in which I could improve it."

You say:
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?

I still feel compassion for Robert Lowell when I remember his true and
utter dilemma regarding his inability to tell the difference between poetry
and prose. I think prolonged meditation and practice brings one to an
impasse, often. When one becomes aware
of the mise-en-abime it's discombobulating.

I think it matters a good deal. One way to test this is to operate between
genres, genders, countries, cultures, classes, states, etc, and see the
difficulties this causes (with border authorities, etc). Besides, that
wobbly place can be fascinating, not only for the lone soul. How can it
not matter, all knowledge being built on categories? They're what makes
the in and out.

 From the VeRT interview:
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'm not taking a stand of course so I don't feel compelled to be
articulate. Still, you could say I'm obsessed with the mechanisms whereby
stands can be taken (as described by Aristotle at the end of Posterior
Analytics, what else).

I think taking a stand can work this way: the real product of a phantom
pregnancy:

"Though a high honor to be kicked by a king wearing horseshoes, it's hardly
as sweet as a Bloody Mary with a wedge of lime."
-- Professor Edson

The second writers workshop I participated in was directed by John
McGahern, an Irish novelist. After the first few sessions it occurred,
even to my slow mind, that I was the only poet round the table. Why, I
asked John, had he let me in (the workshop was competitive)? He told me he
liked my poems: they were almost as good as prose.

Mairead

At 12:00 AM 5/19/01 -0500, you wrote:
>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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