Dear Tilla,
This is very apt for me this morning. The conference was disciplined by time rather than word-count. The proceedings however will be totally disciplined by word-count: 5,000 words for keynote papers; 4,500 for plenary papers, and 2,500 for parallel papers. For the conference, because I worked with time and speed (!), I was able to present 4,100 words in a little over 20 mins.
One can always trim but probably not reduce by 40% without extensive rewriting, which is also vetoed. So it's a conundrum. Structure is necessary and it was a beautifully-organized conference. Yet hierarchy, rigidity, and standardization also have their dangers.
It's interesting that as the papers migrate into a book, the issues of time & timing are shaved away.
I also interested in what you say about stress. I don't enjoy going anywhere unless I'm working. Or, to put it another way, I feel more alienated when I'm not engaged with a place through work. I think some of this has to do with being an emigrant, and the horrible Rip Van Winkle feeling of returning home. Poetry and scholarship make it bearable for me to go back. That said, it probably is a pity that stress is built-in to the deal. I was certainly *extremely* nervous in Plymouth, knowing very few people. When I think back to what I said before: about how giving a hug to a stranger (a woman) in the empty room after my talk was my reward, I can see how laughable that may seem. Yet it's as good a reward as any I've got, and I've been around a long time.
I am getting more impatient with spaces which don't include (actually) people of different ages and circumstances. Difficult as negotiating professional life is, with children, I am growing more and more impatient of professionalism which requires their absence. It's a tension, because I myself like nothing more than to go places, alone, with poetry. Even that has its downside. Children can have an enormously isolating effect on one's professional life, just as they sew one more closely into a local community (or at least more closely than I, for one, would be without them). If you are the sole caregiver for someone, child or otherwise, liberation often means going somewhere alone. Going somewhere with other adults, on a poetry tour, to a residency, etc is a step beyond all that, maybe unattainable for another decade.
Time, for me, is the great discipliner, not word count. I was a journalist for nearly 10 years so I know all about the discipline of word count, poetry continues that discipline. But word count is not salient in the way that time & timing are, for me. Time is the live issue. Maybe a poem might explain my point better. Forgive me if I've sent it before.
Mairead
THE RUSSIAN WEEK
Inside this week is another week & inside that
week is another week & inside that week is another week & inside that
week is another week & inside that week is another week & inside that
week is another week so that instead of 7 days each week is actually composed
of 7 weeks each one a little smaller than its container week but still workable
& with rosy cheeks. This arrangement is necessary. If a week were only a
week aka a standard 7-day week
it would not be possible to get things done. Therefore voila: The Russian Week. As soon as it
becomes apparent that everything cannot get done in the albeit larger, more
commodious week, one can simply crack open the inside week, only slightly less
commodious in size. Then, when things pile up as they are wont to do, one
proceeds to the inside-inside week, its size only slightly less commodious
again. And so it goes. I will not go through the process in tedious detail. For
that it would be necessary to have an
inside-inside-inside-inside-inside-inside-inside week, i.e., 8 weeks in all and
obviously that is impossible. There may be some future in developing a system
whereby each of the 7 weeks which constitute the week would in turn contain 7
weeks, giving 49 weeks in all inside one week, and indeed the prospect of an ad infinitum progression. But this
proposal lacks the calm symmetry of the established model. It is knobby &
hectic where the other is smooth, rounded, generous, economical—and natural.
Thank God for the Russian week.
On 4/15/07, Tilla Brading <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:
As a female-gendered participant at the conference in Plymouth, I saw quite a percentage of other women there who, maybe, like me, were working, moving, caring for others etc etc so weren't able to present a paper on this occasion. It was great to participate without the 'stress' anyway. Further, would I dare to call the conference preponderance of 'page/text-based' writing often within mathematical parameters to have a more male appeal? .... as in mathematical=boundary setting ....??
????
Tilla
