2004-08-08 - 11:40 a.m.

After watching the reading of R & TW's new plays last night and talking with Brian & Zihan about aesthetics, I woke up this morning and started reading Content's Dream, an essay collection on poetics by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Charles Bernstein. A lot of what we were talking about last night was about how successfully R & TW's work generates meaning or opens up more meanings, and the effectiveness of their various aural (like catchphrases and reciting lists) and physical (especially repetitive movements) devices in doing so. So I was saying to Brian how I am very interested in how you can generate meaning by presenting things that force the audience to have some agency in assembling sequences or episodes, but also if there is nothing pulling a piece of work together there is no need for the artist then there is no need for the artist. Art is intervention by the artist first; how large a role the audience has is up to the artist. Which is why I love work such as Sarah Kane's Crave with the voices that drift from many different contexts that allow the audience to extract their own narratives and patterns from it. As Bernstein wrote in "Semblance", "The patterns of projection are not, however, undetermined. The text operates at a level that not only provokes projections by each sentence but by the sequencing of the sentences suggests lines or paths for them to proceed along." Bernstein does this in his own work, which I laboriously tried to analyse in my final paper for the Radical Poetries class using the totally insufficient A-level textual approach - his poems are columns of text, nouns and verbs and articles that allow "[...] a perceptual vividness is intensified for each sentence since the abruptness of the cuts induces a greater desire to savor the intangibility of each sentence before it is lost to the enxt, determinately other sentence."

Comparing his Republics of Reality with other works on the Radical Poetries reading list (such as John Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath and the lushfunnylovely Tender Buttons) made me realise that I had to get out of the first-person lyric narrative style, but that I still needed some syntax and at least a shadow of a narrative: Joseph Cornell's boxes rather than Donald Judd's light installations, so to speak. I don't want to abstract language even to Bernstein's extent, although his poetry already provides more markers than some and "For ---" is one of the best poems about love I've ever read. It's so much easier to abstract things in theatre because there's the physicality of it, the way Jeff Chen did in BOTE by assembling actions and speeches that oscillated from the banal (children buying food back for their mother) to the irresistibly poignant (flicking pegged letters across a clothesline) to the inexplicable and simple (emerging from a door and slamming it). As Brian was saying, everyone can read what they want to into the production because the images are so open; in poetry it's harder to use archetypes without sounding melodramatic and trite. But in "Thought's Measure", Bernstein also expressed the essence of what makes something like BOTE work:

"So that that writing that had seemed to distance itself from us by its solitude - opaque, obscure, difficult - now seems by its distance more public, its distance the measure of its music. A privacy in which the self itself disappears and leaves us the world."

To write until the self of the author disappears and the language becomes entirely public, quivering with significance. To move on from poems purveying prettified information about people I know, and go to what Bernstein calls "non-instrumental (a writing that does not carry a meaning along with it as information to take away, which would make the writing there primarily to serve up this information, a shell in itself)" writing. To tell - not stories, but skeletons of stories that people can enflesh themselves. And how to combine all this with a historical awareness, which is built on specifics and context?? So many steps in between knowing what one wants to write and writing it.

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Yet my goals for prose are entirely different and simpler: to write like Granta contributors, no more no less. Prose for me is much more instrumental in that sense - I want to write about my memories and the people in my life in a very content-driven way. I've never really thought seriously about fiction per se; there always seemed to be enough to do without having to make up my own characters. The prose I want to write is far more dictatorial than the poetry: shoving the reader's head in a cold bath, metaphorically speaking. I remember how I laughed my head off when Prof G (my Radical Poetries prof) told me he hated novels because he can't stand the writer telling him exactly what the characters are and what's happening.

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