With reference to Allen Fisher's remarks about Tjanting by Ron Silliman,
and in relation to strustural homologies for writing drawn from science,
aesthetics, etc.
I feel Allen is too harsh on Silliman, and by extension, upon anyone like
myself who uses numerical constraints or arbitrary and/or motivated
modes of measure. Whilst I am concerned a little that Silliman takes a
pattern found in nature and the gesture looks as though he is making an
equivalent between the text and nature, and thus authorising it, I think
any formal constraint or homology will produce more than a single effect.
I am experimenting with the sonata structure. The repetition of words
seems to me to be very close to the equivalent of rhyme for
wordcounted (isoverbal, remember) texts. But what I'm tyring to do is to
overdetermine those repetitions (the words themselves are derived from
other texts of mine so they reach out to other texts in the network) so
that they occur more often and create another pattern of repetiton within
the poems and between them, there are six. So that the closed nature of
the pattern should not be equivalent to its form, that it develops in other
dimensions, formally.
Every form is an idea. (And not necessarily a good one.)
Constraint, as Harry Matthews and others say, permits.
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