I just started Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (edited by Michael McKeon) and I'm having a hard time with it. It's thick and dense and i'm short on time, but I'm disinterested in categorization as a course of study.

As a writer, I find categorization unhelpful. Perhaps it is a way to teach a number of tools available to a writer, or for a writer to remember them. 

Ultimately, however, communication needs to be at the centre of all writing. To borrow an idea from Philip Larkin, writing is a mechanism to transfer an idea from one person to another. There are lots of tools ranging from the language or the objects to publish the writing or performances. Larkin was talking about poetry as a means of transferring an emotion from the poet to the reader, each with a central purpose or a something for the poem to do in the world. I think of my poems as a script for me to read aloud. Novels use the object of a book, with its many words, to transfer more complex emotions and stories. A play is a blueprint to help the actors transfer a concept or a feeling, or simply a story. I, as a writer, have something inside and I want you to know it too. So I write. 

Categorization is a game for critics and bookshops owners. For bookshop owners, I get it. Things need to be put on shelves to be sold, and novels are things. (This may be apocryphal, but the word 'novel' is said to come from the novel idea of carrying around your entertainment with you.) For critics, I just don't see the point. It's more about creating a literary in-crowd or influencing how readers see work which would otherwise have to (and be able to) stand on its own. Maybe that makes me a philistine, but I just don't see the point. 

I’ve been getting annoyed with reading poetry theory. There’s only so many times you can be told the rule of a sestina or be reminded the difference between an iamb and a trochee. The reading I’ve been doing about poetry… forced rhymes, feminine endings, consonant rhymes, etc, lists of sounds the cultured reader is aware of, classifications of the different types of rhymes… had made my teeth hurt. But I realize I actually love this kind of analysis, it’s just no good on paper. It only works aloud.

I came to poetry through acting Shakespeare. I used to love getting my mouth into Shakespeare. I still do, sometimes reciting my favourite lines to myself walking down the street. For me, the full on acting of it didn’t last in the same way beyond university, and didn’t get much better than certain teachers who had a particular understanding of the way to understand words through your body and act the language through the sounds.

I vividly remember Aldo encouraging us to whisper Sonnet 29 in his acting class so that we could hear the clicking away of the t’s and s’s. Louis told us to sigh our monologues (with relief) making only the vowel sounds in his Linklater Method voice class so we could experience the effect the extremes of the phonetic scale pulling on our throats and lungs. The punctuation in the folio versions tell you where to breathe. Cicely Berry talks about how finding the metre teaches you where to pause and where to drive the meaning. Anna Devere Smith talked about reading a speech over and over again because everything we need to know can be found in a character’s words.

This makes sense to me in acting, even in contemporary prose. I think this is where I learned to write poems, by remembering what it feels like to recite great poetry. I’ll try to remember that. Instead of writing down the lists of t’s used, I’ll whisper it to myself. Instead of counting up all the oo’s and ah’s, I’ll sigh the poem with relief.

Just like blocking on stage should serve as a dumbshow for the subtext, the symphony of clicks and tones in a poem should drawn on the undercurrent of the emotion. But if either of these are done overtly, it ruins everything. Subtlety isn’t enough either. It must be done intuitively.

Smith also said that we all become poets under, often extreme, certain circumstances. Perhaps that is because it focuses us. Maybe I’ll be able to find a deeper fulfillment in writing poems if I see it as an acting exercise. 

My first assignment (one of two) is due today. It is to submit a short poem which, "demonstrates unexpectedness." 

I reacted two ways initially. I wanted to put my best work forward because it will be the work that my class mates will judge me by. I also resented  the idea of unexpectedness because I don't feel that originality is necessarily a worthy goal. Anyways, once i got out of my own ass...


A is for apple,
B is for blue,
C is for crab,
D is for do.

E is for elephant
Frollicing in 
Grass,
Have
Ideals,
Joke with
Kindness,
Search[1] for truth in the
Madraglass.

N is for nothing
O is for omit
P is for, “Peace out my Brothers and Sisters.”
Q is for quit.

______
[1] ‘Search’ is a know synonym of ‘Look’.




Unexpected is essentially a function of expectations. So, before i started writing, I considered expectations. 

1. formal expectations. I set up a pattern and broke it. I could have done this more (not rhyming, etc). but the search for look and not finishing the alphabet was enough. if i break the form too much, it's no longer a form and i'm subverting something that doesn't exist. (Of course, the opposite could also be true, because of the assignment something totally un-unexpected could be unexpected). 

2. the footnote. i'm so fucking postmodern.

3. to play with rhyming. modern poems don't often rhyme with old fashioned rhyming rhymes. 

4. have meaning. the poem means nothing, it's a gibberish poem. i tried to hint at meaning to make the lack of meaning more acute. 'madraglass', as far as i know, is a word i made up. 

5. social expectations. I'll be expected to put forward a good poem, if not my best. This is neither of those. I am subverting the exception of quality and the expectation that serious writers will be serious and try to show off. I also feel i'm expected (based on the reading assignments) to submit serious poetry. this poem nothing but is play.

Nonetheless, I wrote a new poem. It's the first thing my classmates will see and it's not very good. And it isn't directly contributing to the goal of finding my voice. But i think it's the courageous choice because it isn't me trying to be the best in the class. It's me being me. Silly, playful and not taking poetry too seriously. And i feel it is unexpected.

(NOTE: I ended up cutting out the footnote. It was too much.)

What magic is it that binds a group of words into a story? The same magic that binds a group of individuals into a community.

...I have often theorized, come with 2 of the following three: hard word, luck, talent.

Hard word. This is study, developing skills, practice and tenaciously chasing down opportunities.

Lucky. This is finding opportunities which are appropriate to the work that you're working hard on. 

Talent. As in innate talent. As in having all the nurses and doctors enraptured before the umbilical cord is cut. If this exists, it is exceedingly rare.

So there it is. Hard work and luck. Of course, this is only theoretical. I haven't exactly achieved this kind of success... but I'm hoping I can keep up the hard work long enough to get lucky. 

New book. Postmodern Fiction (i can't remember who by, she or he is a very good writer). 

The thesis is basically as follows. Modernists are concerned with works of epistemology (questions of expression, most intimately within thought, usually on a personal level); postmodernists are concerned with questions of ontology (questions experience, what we are, often on a societal level). Writers can cross back and forth between then, or even present both layers in the same work. 

The basic assumption of this thesis is, however, that experience and expression are essentially different. It would be a hell of a good book that demonstrates them as the same.