John and John wrote
>Iwe'd be interested in list-persons distinctions between these two:
>'aleatory' & 'arbitrary'.
Hopes were high here that several writers seen
around these ports might venture forth. I'd like to hear Allen
Fisher's current thoughts on this topic for one example.
Or Gilbert Adair's.
Partly as I, and I would tender
others here, have just been working on something for
the Jackson MacLow 75th b'day mag + CD issue of
Crayon.
Partly, because Jackson's work (he has written
some of the most extraordinary lyric poems of the late
twentieth century) only comes into my
thinking as one reference. What interests me in
this respect are those poems that MacLow is now and has
been making, that are not generated by what he himself
prefers these days to call non-intentional procedures.
He has suggested himself (somewhere, that reference eludes
me - anyone?) that aspects of the non-intentional
are almost hard-wired into his circuitry. Much like
the liminality of the cut-up in Burroughs's psyche.
And for others who practice such constraints and forms
of destabilisation, exquisite interference, deft
interventions. Some Oulipo procedures must come to
take their toll.
The curiosity is strong for me as, having
read much of this stuff as a young writer (not that
I stopped) the syntactical holes punched into the cadences
of language site construction felt locations of
generosity and licensed responsibilities from the outset.
This can all sound far too much like 'going with the flow'.
YUK yuk. It is rather the tension between flow and its
interruption - between discontinuities and contiguities
that generate dark and dynamic resonances in a text.
The discourse 'and between'. Those gaps, those potholes in
the surface across which a reader rides.
I often struggle with the apparent banality, lack
of precision, disparities of intent, multiple focii, of what
I write. Argue with myself about taking all of what
might at first take appear to be the slack out, edit
the coherence into a consistency of a certain clean
gyration.
I welcome (sometimes reluctantly) such moments
as a necessary grappling with the cusps
of the arbitrary - our protestant work ethic or
our catholic guilt or methodist propriety can tease
us all too easily into looking for purity or cutting
the crap or (as Olson put it) pulling the flower up
a leaving the roots hidden under the dirt. It seems
to me that those moments at a poem which appears to
be weak are not always necessarily so.
To ameliorate my position I've taken to wittling
away at work for years, producing differing versions (sometimes
extremely subtle in their differentiations). That's
my way, that's all, of not following an improvisational
- compositional dynamic into first thought best
thought approaches to getting the stuff out of the
house into magazines and books and so on. The
writing is highly mediated, almost meditated, and
positively designated in its arbitrariness.
But then, when is the movement from one
word or phrase and so on to the next not driven
by a dynamic that includes the arbitrary.
I'd take the 'aleatoric' to be a more imposed
restraint that interrupts this arbitrary.
love and love
cris
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