When I write, as I do, line by line, each line is a singular item and enters the page in the sequence it will stay in and is largely unalterable once it is fixed onto the page. I do not own them or have them pre-assigned to a pre-planned structure. I write words not poems and I want to be a stranger to them and their unlikely ways across the page. I have to resist fulfilling expectations of where they should sit and to what degree of positional force. I write them in blocks of either sounds or meanings. The enormity of a finished text never intimidates me because I only negotiate with the present utterance I am writing at the time. Once on the page the items fix to each other like a bacteria that attempts at structural editing will only cause to tighten and beat with the same mood of the moment they were written down. The best I can do is to shave and trim the formation until it operates in tension or harmony with voice.
The vocalised performance breathes a history into the printed text a history that is reoccurring and remembers my aired speech and my animating hands and the rustling paper and the air in the room and the responding noises from the gathered. This can be referred to as the second incarnation of the text one that behaves its history and welcomes shapes of spaces onto the printed page as the shapes of spaces in time and place when and where the text was evented. Calling it the second incarnation also refers to my new relationship to the text as a thing. As a thing that hosted my breathing patterns and my mouth’s movements.
What Gertrude Stein calls the time-sensed within the composition is what I call the remembering of the moment it was vocally aired in the shapes of spaces on the page which re-present the time it took to write it and the time it took to read it out and the time it took to hear it and the time it takes to read it. All of this real time and space punctuation is visually diagrammed to show spaces that are pauses and spaces that are movements and spaces that are respiration and spaces that are a place.
And so the event is permanently marked and is reoccurring as an event and a history and as a shape in space.
The undercurrent
the detached voice.
The mad doctor’s hand moves compulsively
and as compulsively they give him a pen.
And as compulsively they give him a sheet
of paper. And now he is writing.
Soon the marks become words
and soon they can be read
as sentences. Soon the sentences
are pages of thought.
Compulsively they read it.
Bind them with ribbon and
move into date order. Mean
while on the other side of town
Evil Boss of Crime speaks compulsively
and as compulsively they listen. And
as compulsively they work to the words To
the dot to the T.
Course to path the voice followed the pen
and an empire of crime was written. Madness spelt
the way for a vocal life, everyone
wants a vocal life like
mine.
Too loud too bare for each own
ears, the ship sunk and the voice leaked
away. Madness turned cloudy and ate itself
now to be found daily, tearing
the paper that poached it
“It’s really weird that you should have happened across that one. I’ve always felt really weird about it. In fact I think I’ve deleted it from my documents because I can’t find it! I’d always thought it was just ridiculous and I should never show anyone, but I had this weird affection for it and so in the end put it in the appendix as a sort of compromise – to the part of me that wants to be taken seriously and to the other part that of me, that’s a bit nuts. I think I ideally wanted it to be discovered exactly the way you did, for it to be ‘happened upon’ without my shoving it in yours or anyone’s face. Maybe that’s the only way that piece can work…?
Anyway, process? We were set a task by Pete to write an “urban”, concrete-ish piece. It made me want to be a bit sick but I went with it. I think everyone else came up with psychogeographic stuff about the underground – which was probably what he wanted.
I messed about with multi-language genres and then I let myself get sort of sentimental. About London maybe. Then I put it away and forgot about it. Then I started playing with punctuation and using noises and verbal sounds as punctuation instead of pauses and silences. And then I put it all together, only it was less mechanical and considered than that. And all in the space of an afternoon, in case I made it sound like a long seasonal shift.
Editing is weird with me, I write things in a sort of flow, thinking to myself, “I’m going to really work on this, just get something down and then mould it later. But then the text is completely impenetrable, it seems to just lock together. And so I patch over and stitch on – and then that seems to lock together. And the more I try and loosen it the more it seems to resist me interfering. Isn’t that weird? I’ve started talking about it as if it’s alive.
Who knows where it comes from? And I just don’t know how conscious it is. I think the less premeditated it is the more of that “zingy” energy it has. And I really appreciate that description. I think if there’s one thing I can do I think it’s zing.”
