Transverse: Statement

Place - space - what we are in - and is our most overt link to words - everything but not as concrete sense of place per se but to exist to make voluble what abides between things - what is implicit made explicit for our time in or among words - I think is largely the task of writing - of poetry - which like Mallerme noted is all writing except for advertising - and a lot of what goes by the name of writing is advertising - but to be like Adam and Eve going around naming things is the deal because in naming we are connecting - acknowledging what are among and are - making what it is conscious. It is the event. Michael Ruby is about that, in part. But then form becomes interesting - how to place things or how to name things – as it is really the means that is of interest - the thing we sense between things that are actions or directions - the vectors - to seek other modes than hierarchical structures of placement... the only real structure though is the moment of insight - the moment of cise - incise or excise or exercise - but to render that in a way that holds its integrity. And then it's back to Ginsberg and “First take/best take” set athwart Olson with his archeological stance toward the event - the circling in and digging without removing the thing from the site of that exploration, too - that the dirt mound as in Smithson is part of the process - but still the intent through repeated doublings back to zero in on in on the repeating centers and circumferences and that the process itself becomes part of the work - becomes form itself. That form is process - is what is happening - is what is there - is the search. But surely Olson is large in all that sense of place and placing - carrying it back to the body itself and its measure and weight, etc. It's mete -- its "metod," as in Old English - but more than that its Indo-European cognate to the Greek "mêtis," as in craftiness and the absolute knowing of one's place as embodied and carried in the extraordinary by Odysseus, say.

But that's definitely a big part of my interest with the picture with the audio at the moment of composition thing with the type of work in Transverse - of using the immediacy of speaking right into the mike and uncovering whatever is there. A lot of it seems to be an interiority but then that's what's there so that's what's there. What interests me is that anyplace per se has this latent word or verbal layer waiting to be realized - and I mean this literally - words waiting to be spoken with a certain attitude there. Waiting to be released. So that was part of the transverse experiment. I haven't done any for a while for example.... But what you say about delivery is interesting, too, to me - the cadences inherent to doing that. I think that behind the scenes you mention is interesting because that really might be what it's about – like host Alex Trebek of “Jeopardy!” said, “Sometimes it gets so quiet out there you can hear the brain cells dying.” That kind of breathing - to get done to that mitochondrial level of attention and being - those microscopic campfires.

I would also add that my interest with these strips goes back to the challenge of “spontaneous composition” as I understood in relation to studies in Old English and particularly the phenomenon of Caedmon, as related in book IV, chapter xxiv, of the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

from Transverse: [Wall] [Call] [Room]