Jeffrey Side wrote:
> Bob, my responses:
>
> "Why can't mechanisms be of interest, and susceptible to all kinds of interpretations."
>
> Perhaps because they produce a formal static that inhibits translatability.
>
> "As I jabber, I find I feel that the subject is too complex for anything less than a very long, terms-defined, essay."
>
> Would you write one for the Argotist?
>
>
Thanks for the invite. Answer, yes and no. Yes, when I'm less
over-committed than I now am, no for right now. In writing it, I
think I'd need some sample works using mechanisms. I'm a bit hazy at
the nonce on what they'd be. There seem many kinds of mechanism, and ways
of using mechanisms. For instance, I make long-division poems in which
the mechanism of long division is at the fore, sort of the way 8/6
lines, blank-verse, etc. is at the fore in Petrarchian sonnets. The
form sets the reader up--but up, I would hope, to go from it to many
places he might not have. Give the reader a boat, which restricts him
to a water way, but also gives him the means to go much further over it
than he could have without the boat.
Then, of course, there are all the mechanisms for generating poems or
parts of poems. I'm in the process of using one which is just crumpling
sheets of paper with texts on them, and scanning them, then excerpting
parts, and overlaying, and other sorts of fooling around with little
idea where I'm going, just collecting effects I like. But hoping I'll
see some way to make my results more than interesting graphic images.
> "When I compose, I feel my brain randomly tosses elements for use on the page and I choose among them--on the basis usually of how much they do for me, because I can only know that--but believing other human beings, or some other human beings, will have the same kind of brain and background as I and get similar pleasure from them. In a sense, the only reader/viewer I care about is me; in another, I want everyone to be able to experience my work pleasurably."
>
> I see your point, that you have to interest yourself when you write. I agree, but I want the reader to have a unique exegetical experience also. I want a poem to produce a simultaneous performance of itself in the reader, so that there is overload and surplus of potential meanings.
>
>
My only point is that in wanting that for myself, I'm wanting it for
every reader/viewer, as well.
--Bob
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