Hi Doug--
Thanks for your enthusiasm--it's nice to hear this response. As the
foundation and essence of the piece, Alison's poem is excellent ground,
rich with elaborate images and texture all on its own. In its
word-doc-page appearance (before I worked images into it) it is a prose
poem, yes. The breaks (that you ask about) between words are an
interesting quirk of the blogger template entry-screen (I'm no html
wiz, I just tinker with stuff). I noticed when I started playing
around with images in relation to text on-blog that when layering in
the html for an image these breaks occur on the visible screen when the
image-html is not dropped down a line or separated with a space (each
of these creates a slightly different effect). I thought it was weird
at first: undesirable, a variation on mistake. But then I grew to like
the effect because it slows down the reading in interesting ways, and
is unexpected in ways that make the medium part of the writing and
reading. On the other hand, it changes the poem entirely from the
authorial intentions of form. Some poets are interested in such
effects (I like it in my poems), and some really do not (for good
reason: when one puts one's terms in a certain place on the page or
screen, then presumably, one likes them to stay there exactly as
intended). So I am just tinkering, then, though at some point it
really would be great to try to print-publish some of this, but that is
not where I had yet been thinking on it--thanks for that idea.
But in terms of experimentation, the interesting thing to me is that
introducing any change of medium or of even slight constituent parts
can alters the concept of the poem, opening it up to more choices.
Thus, I was asking myself when tinkering with images these last few
months, what happens when a huge or commanding change is not just
introduced, but integrated (as much as the medium would allow for
that). More questions and "delight" arise, I think in the interpretive
choices, then, for reading a poem, and making it into something more
than it was--integrating images electronically even in the humble
little ways of a blog screen, makes the reading and it follows, the
writing, less dependent on a notion of hegemonic authoring and naming,
less author-dependent, less author-centered--even less traditionally
text-centered.
Fluidity of textuality becomes more readily apparent, even if also
disruptive, since images are so commanding a presence to us culturally.
And then with a collage-based addition of many kinds of images, the
images seem to me to also lose some of that cultural hegemony in terms
of reading/writing. These ideas, the less-author-centered/more
reader-centered idea follows with, say, Foucault's problem with
author-centered culture and then Stanley Fish's theories about readerly
reception, that readers radicalize poems every time they
read--especially where ambiguities of perception in space are concerned
(Fish discusses it famously in terms of Milton's ambiguous enjambments
in "Interpreting the Variorium"). Fish: "Interpretive strategies...are
the shape of the reading, they give texts their shape, *making* them,
rather than, as is usually the case, arising from them."
I hope this clarifies the editorial thinking involved: Alison had
kindly assented to my tinkering this way with her already very powerful
poetry.
Best Wishes,
Chris Murray
http://texfiles.blogspot.com
http://e-po.blogspot.com
http://www.uta.edu/english/znine
-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Sun, 8 May 2005 09:02:09 -0600
Subject: Re: Alison Croggon featured on chris murray's Texfiles
It looks terrific, Chris & Alison.
I am wondering if you intend to publish it, say, in a book sometime,
with the photos there where they are on the screen. As also the large
spacings in some lines. Or am I more 'correct' to take it as
essentially a prose poem, but with separate sections/lines? However it
goes, it is powerful.
Doug
On 7-May-05, at 1:49 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Hi All--
>
> Just a note to let you know that I have begun a feature of Alison's
> poetry at Texfiles, and each day or so will be posting a new poem of
> Alison's over the span of a couple of weeks.
>
> Hope Y'all enjoy.
>
> Best Wishes,
>
> Chris Murray
> http://texfiles.blogspot.com
> http://e-po. blogspot.com
> http://www.uta.edu/english/znine
>
>
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
I don’t need to
hold back here
in the union
of forms
Charles Olson
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