Blogs, Floods, and Black Mountains
A sort-of back at work day. K- left the house by 8.am and I got up to make another mug of tea only to find water gushing noisily out of a previously unnoticed little white outdoors pipe that jutted discreetly between kitchen and bedroom exterior walls. The patio was slowly filling up with cold, fresh water. Donner was dozing on the duvet, oblivious. Blitzen, however, was trilling in disapproval. He doesn't like water, nor does he like to be restricted in his feline wanderings. Some sort of flood, I thought. What to do.
There are two flats directly above ours. I went to see if anyone was in. Directly above: no reply. Top flat: the resident couple were in and popped down forthwith. We agreed it was the missing resident who needed to call the plumber. I tried our estate agents but was told that it wasn’t our problem, unless encroaching water damage was imminent. So we waited. I worked at the kitchen table, with water pulsing relentlessly outside. So much water. Blitzen insisted on slipping out through the catflap, dipping his paws into this unfamiliar, ever-increasing lake in his domain. Then on running back in and making his mark on my open lit crit texts. As the cat. This state of play carried on for most of the day. Finally the absent upstairs tenant returned and an emergency plumber was called. The flooding stopped, although apparently ‘nothing’ was wrong in the first place.
With all this unwelcome hydraulic dysfunction going on, I didn’t get quite as much accomplished as I intended. However I’ve registered for a conference in California next July – giving a paper on blogging, so you’ll definitely be hearing more about that. Then I carried on catching up with American poetry. Today revisited the Black Mountain poets, and Charles Olson’s 1950 ‘Projectivist’ Manifesto.
It’s good to have to revise such things, to revisit the matrix of poetic thought and practice from which contemporary poetry grows. Perhaps because I’m having to absorb more of a rapid overview than with the British poetry I’m familiar with, I’m even more aware of the alternation of commitment between formal and free verse poetries and the rationale behind them. The systole and diastole, classical and radical. Each needing the other, though unawares.
I was interested in the attention Olson gave, in his manifesto, to typography – the new potential offered by the use of the typewriter. ‘It is time we picked the fruit of the experiments of cummings, Pound, Williams, each of whom has, after his way, already used the machine as a scoring to his composing, as a script to its vocalisation.’ He issued advice on use of space, indented lineation, subtle indications of pause, and the opening and then not closing of a parenthesis to indicate a digression becoming the main subject of a phrase; charting the process of poetic creation in all its obliquity and serendipity of ideas. I like this approach very much – I’ve used it myself, although not particularly in conscious reference to Olson, and certainly not in half so much a planned way as did Olson, who withdrew a manuscript from his publishers (the second volume of Maximus) when they couldn’t or wouldn’t comply with his exact typographical demands. Poets can be picky – on a tangential note, Charlotte Mew insisted that some of her longer-lined poems were published in such a way that the book containing them must be turned sideways. Tell it slant.
Not sure how this requirement to consider the typographical/ presentational elements of a poetic text have translated to the internet – the choice and readerly decisions implicit in hypertext; the visual possibilities of Flash. But there’s something about typographical play that keeps text, language and breath to the fore I think. Long may it breathe, with or without watery paw prints.
There are two flats directly above ours. I went to see if anyone was in. Directly above: no reply. Top flat: the resident couple were in and popped down forthwith. We agreed it was the missing resident who needed to call the plumber. I tried our estate agents but was told that it wasn’t our problem, unless encroaching water damage was imminent. So we waited. I worked at the kitchen table, with water pulsing relentlessly outside. So much water. Blitzen insisted on slipping out through the catflap, dipping his paws into this unfamiliar, ever-increasing lake in his domain. Then on running back in and making his mark on my open lit crit texts. As the cat. This state of play carried on for most of the day. Finally the absent upstairs tenant returned and an emergency plumber was called. The flooding stopped, although apparently ‘nothing’ was wrong in the first place.
With all this unwelcome hydraulic dysfunction going on, I didn’t get quite as much accomplished as I intended. However I’ve registered for a conference in California next July – giving a paper on blogging, so you’ll definitely be hearing more about that. Then I carried on catching up with American poetry. Today revisited the Black Mountain poets, and Charles Olson’s 1950 ‘Projectivist’ Manifesto.
It’s good to have to revise such things, to revisit the matrix of poetic thought and practice from which contemporary poetry grows. Perhaps because I’m having to absorb more of a rapid overview than with the British poetry I’m familiar with, I’m even more aware of the alternation of commitment between formal and free verse poetries and the rationale behind them. The systole and diastole, classical and radical. Each needing the other, though unawares.
I was interested in the attention Olson gave, in his manifesto, to typography – the new potential offered by the use of the typewriter. ‘It is time we picked the fruit of the experiments of cummings, Pound, Williams, each of whom has, after his way, already used the machine as a scoring to his composing, as a script to its vocalisation.’ He issued advice on use of space, indented lineation, subtle indications of pause, and the opening and then not closing of a parenthesis to indicate a digression becoming the main subject of a phrase; charting the process of poetic creation in all its obliquity and serendipity of ideas. I like this approach very much – I’ve used it myself, although not particularly in conscious reference to Olson, and certainly not in half so much a planned way as did Olson, who withdrew a manuscript from his publishers (the second volume of Maximus) when they couldn’t or wouldn’t comply with his exact typographical demands. Poets can be picky – on a tangential note, Charlotte Mew insisted that some of her longer-lined poems were published in such a way that the book containing them must be turned sideways. Tell it slant.
Not sure how this requirement to consider the typographical/ presentational elements of a poetic text have translated to the internet – the choice and readerly decisions implicit in hypertext; the visual possibilities of Flash. But there’s something about typographical play that keeps text, language and breath to the fore I think. Long may it breathe, with or without watery paw prints.
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