Hi Frances,

thanks for attaching the paper and the bibliography.

Other work by Carla Harryman directly relevant to your concerns:

'Vice' (Potes & Poets, 1986)
'Under The Bridge' (This, 1980)
'The Words' (unpublished) utterly compelling, ludic novel length riffing
from Sandburg's 'Rootabaga Stories' and Jean-Paul Satre
'The Middle' (Gaz, 1983) from which:

'My syntax, being inherent to myself, lack character. I
have no identity. I have learned to fabricate an identity by
imitating someone else. Since I am forced to write in
the nude, I often fantasize wearing beautiful clothes. In this
way, I never suffer from abuse, since my characterlessness
is not perceived.'

And from Lyn Hejinian:

'Oxota: A Short Russian Novel' (The Figures, 1991) 270 'free' sonnets,
based on Pushkin from which:

'Chapter 240

I spoke of rain and received what I spoke of
A continuation of quotations
Misha ate incredibly slowly, as if every bite of mutton soup was
    a test of his honesty
And he returned with manic persistence to the pot as if it
    contained some mystery
Finally he wrapped a piece of bread around a bouquet of
    parsley - a scrap of green wagged at the side of the
    sandwich
They will only accept letters in white envelopes now
That's good, Arkadii said, all my envelopes are white
Literary relics, historical scenes, sea battles can be
    internationally dispersed
Also scientific facts - the things children collect
Sudden American paperbacks
The destruction of the postulaes in poetry on which that
    notorious reference depends
I decided to add the following line
My face at the window so unfamiliar it refuses
The refracted phrases as we opened the window to the rain'

(brief interlude - soon after moving to Lowestoft i was reading sections of
'Oxota' out loud in the back garden every morning. Almost every morning,
the next door neighbour, a retired seaman in his late eighties, would sit
in his wheelchair, on the other side of a flowering honeysuckle, listening.
Neither of us ever mentioned it. He died that summer)

Then there's Bernadette Mayer:

'Midwinter Day' (Turtle Island Foundation, 1982) from which:

'The person and the people are these mouth-size toys, broken Mother
Goose Jack-in-the-box with Old King Cole on it clutters the hall
with proper nouns liek Donald Duck orange juice and Mickey
Mouse Halloween masks, a real cow that milks, you say no look and
oh first though other noises came once before to be better as sounds
than nouns as memory or more than one of those like these clutters
which are made of all this in all the rooms today which will be
cleared and then will have been a mess like a person I'm fond of
who's changed, not like a diaper.'

'Memory' (North Atlantic Books, 1975) utterly extraordinary writing.

Lying in bad this morning reading this passage from Cixous (i know it
sounds like i'm making it up  -  but i'm not)  -  in 'Three Steps on the
Ladder of Writing' (1993)

'Not only is there a war between people, but this war is produced by sexual
difference. And not just by sexual difference. By the wiles, paradoxes, and
surprises that sexual difference reserves for us. This is why the man-woman
conflict is insufficient for me, in my time, in my place. It is a question
of sexual difference, only sexual difference isn't what we think it is.
It's both tortuous and complicated. There is sexual difference, and there
is what it becomes in its appearances and distributions in each one of us.'

brings me to your quoting Carla, on wanting to 'distribute narrative,
rather than deny it'.

love and love
cris







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