Reading Notes

Summer (n): The second and warmest season of the year, coming between spring and autumn

It’s officially summer here on the eastern shore of Maryland; it’s close to 90 degrees and too hot to do anything outside so all I want to do is rotate brief naps with periods of productive reading, and that’s exactly what I do. During the rest of the year, I find it difficult to focus on much more than pleasure reading because my brain space is simply not capable of retaining anything other than what I’m teaching or things that inform the work I’m currently doing in the Center or in the classroom. I also have the bad habit of reading like a graduate student, only mining others’ work enough to get a sense of what the author is up to and then move on.

In the summer, though (I am lucky enough to have June and July off), I am free to dedicate that brain space to my own consumption and production. Often that consumption and production has a lot to do with what I will do in the Center and in the classroom, but I also get to dedicate a lot of time to writing and reading poetry with the kind of mindfulness I feel like I can’t give it during the academic year. I often delay even making coffee before I grab the book beside my bedside table and get to work, neglecting to move until my bladder or stomach start to remind me to get up.

Here are a few of the books I’ve already started, and what I’ve learned so far. I hope more complete “reviews” will appear up here upon completion. If you think of it, leave a comment for other suggestions that might resonate alongside these works and my intentions for reading them!

• Conversites (1913 Press), Dan Beachy-Quick and Shrikanth Reddy. Collaborations are fascinating. The humanities and literary arts are one area where collaboration is still a novelty. Other areas do not privilege the singular authorial authoritarian force, thereby encouraging collaborative efforts. These two (two of my favorite authors in general) put their collaborative composition to good use, both presenting a beautiful, lyric meditation, and a meta-commentary on the self. The book contains their Mobius Crownes, a sonnet crown published originally by P-Queue and which was sold out by the time I got to their table at AWP that year. I am so happy to have this book in my hands. I am already learning so much from them, since in both my projects there was an “I” to combine (though I am appropriating an “I,” where they are sharing an “I.”
• A, (New Directions), Louis Zukofsky. Zukofsky is the last objectivist I have yet to read. I fell so hard in love with Oppen I’m not sure why I delayed so long taking on A, since Zukofsky is regularly cited as the principle objectivist… but as per the notes above summer opens up the possibility to take on a larger project. A is 803 pages long and will inevitably take the summer or more to finish. But as per Zukofsky’s own direction, I read in search of “particulars.” He writes: “To find a thing, all things.” I’m only in about 10 pages so I have little to say as of yet, but I’m excited to get more into this.
• Radi Os, (Flood Editions), Ronald Johnson. This is a return, since I’m working on this erasure project and figured I’d go to the best. I often return to Johnson. Shrubberies and Ark are two of my favorite poetry books of all time. Somehow he manages to make Paradise Lost feel like his own writing even though he’s lifting his text out from the famous epic. It’s teaching me a lot, again. As with any text making use of another text, there will always be meta-poetic moments, such as “All things / / Compose / Of what we are and where,” and “the chosen / Rose out of Chaos,” which can be read as a reaction to the process of composing the text. Johnson, though, resists the prophetic rationale for the process and instead presents a lyric eye and ear, choosing words that pleasure, and leaving space that behaves more like light than void. In my own erasures when I find those meta-moments so easily I am always so tempted to indulge, and I miss what is lurking in the other words, the real substance of that thing I am putting together. Needless to say, Johnson is a constant companion, and I’m grateful. Anyone who hasn’t read this book needs to, immediately.
• Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (Graywold Press), Ander Monson. In my English 101 course (Composition and Literature), I often teach hybrid texts that don’t quite fit snugly into the origin genre of the work. Monson’s collection of non-fiction essays is just that. He claims, defiantly, in the sub-title that it is not a memoir, and yet constantly questions that assertion throughout the collection. This is another text that considers the textual “I,” but does so through doing quite a lot of violence to the traditional non-fiction essay, to turn it around, shake the letters out, and attempt to arrive at a new thing that is merely essay-like. I am mining this for something we might read in my English 101 course, but I also genuinely respect Monson’s work (and not only because he published me in DIAGRAM that one time).

There will be more, and there will be some pleasure reading, that’s for sure. But these are my primary intentions for the summer, because they will be of some use as I’m producing work of my own. I find it helpful to read with that kind of intention, to read with a purpose. I try to teach my students this. I ask them what they are looking for, and to trace their obsessions through the texts as we go. What is the arc? How are these things connected?

More to come. 

Commonplace Book (n): A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement

In my composition and literature course this spring I am having my students keep a commonplace book. As I told them on our wiki:

The tradition of keeping a “commonplace book” goes back for centuries. Through the process of gathering words, phrases, and quotations from the texts we encounter we are able to create an image of our thinking in the gatherings we put down on the page. Before the “copy and paste” ease of the internet, commonplace books were the storage containers of a reader’s thinking. Many authors and readers still keep commonplace books to this day, though some have moved their books to public forums like blogs, facebook, twitter, and social readings sites such as goodreads.

Sometimes (often) my thinking process is not very linear, so the concept of blogging is a little difficult for me sometimes — the ominous vertical stretch of post space to fill is daunting and lately I find myself resisting it because I think about linear narratives all day (well-crafted emails, assignment prompts, working with student essays, etc). That was a very long sentence.

I am going to try to get over myself, and take a lesson from my own lesson plan. Sometimes, in lieu of reviews, I will write a commonplace entry. There, I’ve said it. It is on the task of this blog, along with field notes and ramblings and event notifications (of which there are many I have missed as of late… my apologies).

The beauty of the commonplace book is that, by definition, it does not have a particular order. It is a gathering. My handwritten commonplace books are separate by project, and serve as some kind of physical reminder of all of the work I’ve done. Sometimes I write a lot of reflection on what I’ve gathered. Sometimes I just let quotations and lists stand for themselves, resonating in their own space by the mere fact that I took the time to write them down.

The first commonplace book entry my students are working on is for the essay Against the Grain, by David Bartholomae. This is my own commonplace entry on the article:

“How I write is against the grain” (192) — against the wood grain, opposite of the expected — but doesn’t everyone do this? I think so often we are TOLD what a writing process should look like, and the reason it takes so long for us to figure out what our own writing process is like is because those things that people told us to do didn’t make any sense. I often wondered, for example, how the hell I was supposed to write an outline when I didn’t know what I was going to write about yet. I never knew… so I wrote the essay and THEN wrote the outline.

“Writing gets in my way and makes my life difficult…” (192) — but I love it, even when it is hard.

“…I’m not making history, but… I am intruding upon or taking my turn in a conversation others have begun before me” (193) ahh, the conversation. Response is key. This is all I ever want to teach my students, is to enjoy the response, to find the compulsion to respond.

Words and phrases he uses to describe his writing process:

• resistance
• “help me speak”
• historic moment
• “letting the paper bounce around in my head”
• things, never ideas or theses
• discourse
• conversation/confrontation
• pressure
• challenge
• add, subtract, rearrange
• “dump and revise”
• interfering
• multi-layered — adding layers
• someone who speaks
• “to borrow authority”
• “struggle free from the presence of others”
• “giving over and giving up”
• “surrender and betrayal”
• compelled
• project
• NOT invention or originality
• “a most difficult grace”

“This [the personal confrontation with another figure] is the most powerful influence and it is the influence of another writer, a person represented by a verbal, textual presence — a set of terms, a sound and a rhythm, a sensibility — that I cannot push our of my mind or erase from my own writing” (194)

(His dissertation advisor REJECTED his dissertation!? It’s really incredible this guy became such a leading scholar in the composition world).

“The problem here was not so much what I had to say about Thomas Hardy but what I did with what I had to say and how, in fact, I went about saying it. It’s hard to learn how to deal with this — with the pressure of language to be so pat, complete, official, single-minded; with the pressure of language against complexity, uncertainty, idiosyncracy, multiple-mindedness — and it’s very hard to teach students to work against fluency, the “natural” flow of language as it comes to a writer who has a grasp of a subject” (196) — I think this grasp of a subject thing is key.

“I try very hard to interfere with the conventional force of writing, with the pressure toward set conclusions, set connections, set turns of phrase” (196) YES! I have been resisting convention for so long… but so often conventions are comforting, they tell us what to do. What they don’t tell us is WHY they are telling us to do the thing they are telling us, or HOW that convention makes logical, organic sense (often it does not).

“I often think of writing as multilayered, although not in the sense that there is a center, like the center of an onion, that can be revealed or discovered once the layers are peeled away and sloughed off. I think, rather, that I revise to add a layer, often discordant, over a layer that will also remain — so that there is a kind of antiphony” (196). Who told us that there was a “hidden meaning” in the first place? Why was it hidden? What amount of writing could uncover it? I like this — layers added, not layers surrounding.

“I revise… so that it seems to assert the presence of someone who speaks as more than the representative of an institution or a brand of research or a discipline” (196) — I do not agree with this. Writing is so different than speech. We think differently in written language. What about poetry? Poetry is not (necessarily) linear, narrative, even in grammatically correct sentences.

Western tradition of writers and theories “good writing is efficient writing” — resisting this (197).

“My academic life has been marked by people, not by ideas or theories alone or in the abstract” (198).

What he needed was a “project” (199) — what is the project for us in this class? What project might the students undertake in their college careers? How does this course fit into that? This is definitely the key motivating factor — how do I inspire that in my students? Can I?

Dialogue (n): A conversation carried on between two or more persons; a colloquy, talk together.

This holiday break I read Nicholson Baker’s VOX, a novella entirely comprised of the dialogue between two people who have called an adult phone service. The conceit is impressive — Baker holds the reader in the position of the eavesdropper. The only context we get for either character is that which is provided through the conversation. I first came to Baker through another novella, The Mezzanine, which is almost entirely composed in lengthy footnotes. Rather than supplemental information, the footnotes serve as a diversion, parallel to the diversions the main character inserts into his own pattern of thought to distract himself from handling any genuine emotional turmoil.

Baker’s texts are appealing to me in that they offer a form of constraint for the reader that thoroughly impacts the way in which we are capable of reading the text. I, as the reader, am both intimately involved and seriously distant from the two conversationalists who explore their mental and sexual selves with each other. I am only given what I am given. Inference is a necessity. I have the same burning desire to know more that the characters do.

In poetry of constraint it is often the system that is contained — a specific process (Christian Bok’s EUNOIA is the perfect example — he had to find all of the words that only contained single vowels and sort them into chapters to establish his lexicon before he could even begin to put those words together into a narrative). Baker’s projects present a constrained product but not process as a specific intention for the audience. The system allows for surprise and wilderness in the result, the product allows for the audience to feel placed at a specific point of access to the narrative unfolding. I find both compelling — I wonder if it is the element of plot or narrative movement that feels so energized by what is left out?