Apologies for the lack of posts last month. I've been working three different jobs trying to cobble together a livelihood. I will try to be better and I will probably increase my posting as I work on this project to give early audiences "insider insights" regarding my process. I just received a Toronto Arts Council Grant for a book of poetry. I am having it professionally edited. I'm very excited to embark on this new chapter in my writing life! Here is the description of the project I submitted to the Coun
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This project is an engagement with several traditions of avant garde poetry, especially concrete poetry, Oulipo, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. It is also heavily influenced by the postmodern novels of Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis, who in their novels Gravity's Rainbow and The Recognitions, used motif as the structuring principle of their works, rather than plot. As many of the writers in these traditions have not experienced commercial success, I think this is the kind of work that Arts agencies should support. My engagement with concrete poetry and Oulipo (both strongly represented in Toronto by writers such as bpNichol, Christian Bok, and others) is critical. I think most concrete poetry does not lend itself to re-reading, because once you "get" it, there remains no reason to read it. In this way, they are more like puzzles than poems. My favourite poems are the ones that shift with your own consciousness as you read them, the ones that reward you for re-reading them over and over again. However, I think concrete poetry's central insight that language has a material dimension is very important, so I wanted to incorporate that insight into this collection of poems. Oulipo tends to produce work that has very little emotional resonance. However, free composition, while it has its place, often fails to create works of lasting value. Adding constraints to your writing practice is a good way to improve your discipline.
"Running out of Words" often features poems with formatting that have some kind of pictorial aspect. Since I am a published artist and photographer as well, I am incorporating some of my drawings and photographs into the manuscript to enliven it and to reflect its themes and motifs. The first poem, a prologue, is about poetry itself, asking the question "what shape is a poem?" All of the subsequent poems will use all the words and ideas of the prologue as a springboard for new poems, growing out of it as if it is a collection of seeds in soil. This is the constraint, consonant with Oulipo. The last poem, the epilogue, uses all of the same words as the prologue, with some slight changes to make it make more sense. Towards the end of the collection, the poems move from fairly transparent to dense L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E inflected poems where wordplay is the modus operandi of composition. The themes I deal with are the human relationship with nature (nature as God), documenting personal experiences, finding one's place in the world as an autistic person, and the difficult legacies of colonialism and patriarchy. I use strong motifs of fences, fire, philosophy of death and time, and human-nature relationships. While incorporating aspects of the aforementioned avant-garde traditions, I write poems with maximal re-reading value and emotional resonance. I envision this collection to be 100 pages, and so far I have written 25 pages.
