Writing Experiment (Week 9)

Here are some experiments for you to try this week:

1. Erasure: Take a text of your own or someone else's and crossout MOST of the words on each page, retype what remains as its own poem. For a beautiful example of a "treated text", an erasure that's done ON the surface of the source text, have a look at Tom Phillips' A Humument.

OR

2. Time Warp: Create a short piece of fiction by writing just 3 sentences at a time but ONLY at the top of every hour of the day. How many hours in a row can you keep up the exercise? For how many days? It's ok (and probably necessary) to miss a few o'clocks (for sleeping especially - or are you willing to set your alarm every hour?), just pick up the exercise where you left off. At the end of the day or days, compile your sentences onto a single page. Feel free to leave them as is, rearrange them, tweak the transitions, or build largely upon them, but DON"T toss any sentences away.

This week I'd also encourage you to comment on the writing experience (challenges, insights, discoveries, analogies) and compositional context (where were you, what time of day, what materials were you using, what mood were you in, what else was on your mind just prior to or just after the exercise, who was the last person you'd talked to and about what did you discuss, what was the last thing you'd eaten, what was in the news/on the tv that day, what was on the radio/your iPod, what was the last thing you'd spent money on, what was your last worry, your last excitement, your last laugh). The idea is not to extrapolate meaning or read your work through these particular recollections necessarily, but rather to build a partial picture and awareness of the local contexts that surround a singular act of writing at a given time in your life. These reflections will of course count toward your note-taking requirement this week.

Discussion Questions (week 9)

Here are a few discussion questions for this week. Answer as many or as few as needed to get some ideas down in note form:

• How might "weather" be defined (by you/the dictionary/Wikipedia)? Are there multiple and distinct definitions? What does "the weather" mean to you? What personal associations do you make with the concept of weather? With the phrase "the weather" (as a piece of language)? How is the weather commonly understood/discussed/thought of/observed/represented scientifically? socially? in pop-culture? politically? Has our conception of/relationship to the weather always been the same throughout history (don't bother with research, but make a conjecture)?
• What's immediately noticeable about the Lisa Robertson's The Weather? What's interesting/commendable about the book? What's uninteresting? What's not immediately obvious but observable over time/after reflection? Can you describe or make observations on the style of the book? the form of the book? What kind of information is Lisa Robertson presenting us with in The Weather? What kind of vocabulary/diction? How is information/tone/language presented to us in the book? organized? What's the overall tone of the book? Does that tone change throughout or is it constant?
  
• Relate your responses to the first two sets of questions together. How does the title relate to the book's style? to the book's content? the book's form? How does the title affect how you read/make meaning of the book? How does the book change or augment your associations with weather?
  
• Given the publication date, what social/cultural/national/personal/historical/political events or relationships (contexts) might expand or illuminate our understanding of what the book is doing? (I'm not asking you to find allusions in the book, but rather, asking you to reflect on the social/cultural/etc. landscape of the last five years as a way of contextualizing Robertson's writing strategies or how the book continues to be meaningful today - that is, how does this book reflect/react to/question/relate to the cultural contexts which surround its production & presentation).
  

Last one out

I particularly like when Richards blends poetry such as in the first two sections of the book. The experiential content of the poetry interacts dynamically with the external content, be it the movie in the second section or the myriad definitions, articles, and floating words in the first. Thats Love is kindof note-book style, its more like tthe process parts of the book of jon, notes and brainstorms generated before writing poetry. This stuff is cool, especially because it interacts visually with the reader. The last section has less of this quality, it is more cross-genre deconstruction which is a weird combo. There is less dynamic interaction and more play of concepts.

workshop for thursday

The Rebellion of the Leopard

We paid the check and we sallied out without incident
as we walked towards everything outside in rain
the girl with the impression of Aaron
the trousers of the leopard.

"you are so as, in the news or something"
Its nasal voice of the south of Jersey did that my skin crawls.
"that shit that it presses so. A business is right that you also know.
He is everything on the money, they does not say the truth unto him."
He watched it with an expression that shouted scorn simultaneously and the diversion.
"please spare the details" that he said.

The diversion fell immediately of its face. Its lip was stirred up in synch
with its eyebrow whereas it was dazzled in her.
"Ugh" rolled towards outside as if the second nature
"is rebelling so trustworthy of you?"

And reasons raged ahead in the middle of stiffled sobs and the unequal breathing
and she looked extinguished as if their feet burned simultaneously
and buried in the concrete lip of Aarons still was stirred up
and a cigarette maintained were put too much firmly towards
outside whereas we watched her disappear by always


In the Hall of the Mountain String Band


all is silent with the exception of labored breathing
and thunderous appluase from the mighty zeus

out pops a screaming child
born into the world screaming in silence
and asleep within moments
sleeping the sleep of lions fed

in silence the music grows
ten years since the day
and a soft tune that reminds the crowd
of necessary moments of silence
when the calamity was too great to bear
and moments of blaring triumph
when the mundane silences where to loud hear

the guitar came in first with sweeping and subtle melody
to warm its listeners like hot apple cider on a cool falls day

then the bass slinks in at frequencies so low and sparse
its impossible to imagine what that bass had in mind

the rhythm of bongos and cymbals in the distance
signal the oncoming war, the oncoming music of eternity

and ever so gently the mandolin sweeps in
like a lonesome breeze across the back of a sweltering neck

in the scalding desert where stagnant air and silence is king
the music grows when the silence is patient
and the cacaphony waits for its moment to strike
like lightning that touches down but once
and never again

and one more random thought

Ok, what was the color, make and model?
It's cranberry and...
Cranberry's something you eat, son, your car was red.

Writing Experiment (Week 8)

Here are this week's writing experiments:

1. Write a 30-line poem or a 15-sentence paragraph. Copy-paste each line/sentence into this free online translator and choose a language into which your words will be translated. Now copy-paste the translated writing into the translator and re-translate the line/sentence BACK into English. Recompose your poem/paragraph with your new translations. Try several languages. Try translating a single line/sentence more than once. Don't worry about poor transitions, grammar, glitches, nonsenses, etc. Be humoured. Be amazed.

OR

2. Write a “conversation” in which no words are said. This exercise is meant to challenge you to work with gesture, body language (or, as a baseball announcer I heard once misspeak it, body English), all the things we convey to each other without words. We often learn more about characters in stories from the things characters do with their hands than from what they say. It might be best to have some stranger observe this conversation, rather than showing us the thoughts of one of the people involved in the conversation, because the temptation to tell us what the conversation is about is so great from inside the conversation.

[I'm appropriating the above experiment from this cool website of fiction exercises I just discovered...have a peek at the rest]


ps. this post's pic comes from collage artist Bernie Stephanus whose work I also stumbled into online yesterday.