Hey everybody, I'm Michelle, Will invited me to get in on your collaborative & blog so here I am :) Feels kind of funny bombarding in when you all don't know me so I'll introduce myself a little- I'm from MA, going to be a middler, and an English major. I'm reading a lot of American literature right now, on a Graham Greene spree and loving it; and I'm developing an interest in poetry, where I'm definitely an amateur, but starting to get a sense of my identity there.
I was talking to Will a little bit about what it really means, this idea you have going, and while from my first impression I'm not sure what I want to do totally fits in with the general concept of group (synthesis) over individual, I figured we'd chat and maybe get a better idea. I'm going to post some work soon so you can have an idea of what I write like, but in general I guess you can think of two main things that pin me as a writer: one, I seek intimacy, between reader and writer, under the guideline of 'symbiotic witness' which I think is a need that drives a lot of what people do... and two, I have more experience in 2D art and reading & writing fiction, and now I'm starting to try some poetry, so in poetry and prose I value storytelling, imagery, and posturing/dialogue. Which, I guess, is why I think I might not completely fit with your ideals, because I value the individual highly; the writer, the chosen voice/character, the reader.
Okay so I guess I'll just post something now. I don't have anything really polished and fabulous to make a stellar first impression with, but oh well... I actually wonder if you all have any ideas or advice about that; I feel like I can't go back and edit poems or they just lose all their authenticity and sincerity. Here's one I recently wrote, but tell me what you think? I guess right now I want to write poems that sound orally viable, that have a character's voice but still, smart syllables (working on it)...I was also thinking of toying with an unreliable narrator with this... anyways enough, here you go...
Mad Gab/The difference between the two of you:
There's a game where one person reads nonsense off a card
and the other translates it to something real
(and meanwhile tastes it like maple syrup,
tapping it against all the places in the mouth
carefully, tentatively, mouthing and asking it to reveal itself)
I played this with you on the couch. You flipped a card and read,
"End office her render giant almond."
It sounds terrible, I think as I taste it.
END officeherrenderGIANTalmond... endOFFICEherRENDERgiantalmond...
I stop to watch you glare at the card- the little muscles under your eyes flicking, and your lips
chewing the words like a piece of gum.
You want to win. I let you because I don't want to play anymore.
"An officer and a gentleman!" you exclaim like "eureka!".
I'm glad you're having fun, but we split up soon.
The difference between the two of you is this:
he and I play a version
where he speaks nonsense to me in beautiful strings
that wind like DNA helicase and I taste them as wine
drunk slowly and with much delight, sensing grapes, labor, and heat,
and I take out my microscope and unwind the words,
like he unwinds my sounds and asks them to reveal me.
Nothing so complicated as "I love you," nor anything as blunt
(for the time being, no, nothing so conventional
though his tongue fleeted once on a mention of marriage,
where the priest reads the words one deciphers, I guess)
but he instead, says,
"I lost all respect for Mel Gibson. He should've stopped at sugar tits."
"Cellar door ain't lo-li-ta."
"Your feet remind me of humpback whales."
"Maybe we'll be conducting one symphony soon."
Mumbly "sorry," when he rolls to my side, and stays.
And "This, this, this, is my favorite place," he says gently with his mouth.
He sighs gladly through his nose.
His gaze is as steady as a schooner in the bay
and his compass is pointed at me.
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Hi there. To me it sounds like Will has given himself up as a socialist, and I can only lament that McCarthy is no longer with us. I don't think anyone is here to try and subvert your individuality, but [at least in my mind] more so that the general idea is through collaboration we become stronger individually and collectively.However, I will add that I've got this idea in my head of trying to write something collectively under an umbrella pen name. Anyways, you should ask James for his equation which perhaps spells it out most clearly [English is full of wiggle room, Math is not].
ReplyDeleteI just graduated from NU from the School of Architecture, so I also don't have anywhere near the amount of writing or perhaps even reading experience that everyone else here likely does, and would argue I fit in even less than you do. Will tells me I am a modernist, though I just write for the need to get these things out of my head.
Don't feel as though this is strictly for poetry either, I've been drowning everyone here in parts of a chapter [for which I have no remorse...I expect you all to memorize it, backwards!]. Yea, but I draw and do some graphic work on the side and I'm hoping to bring some of that to this whole thing as well. And I'm rambling some I'm going to st
Well, Mike. No one said the Red Scare was dead.
ReplyDeleteAs for this..Michelle, I am happy to see you are up and at it. As to comment, I can sense some hesitation and that is all necessary I think. I spent a long time trying to convince myself that the editing process was a filthy thing, but it's not so much an edit as a 'revision'..and to get at that more clearly..'RE---Vision' try and look at it that way..it could help..each time you revisit a piece of work you will occupy a different time, full of varied circumstance, suggestion, emotional grounding...and I guess, the struggle is maintaining spontaneity without sacrificing the initial force and seemingly fresh and potent prose.
I'd like to spend some more time with what you've got posted here. In the mean time, let it fly. I am thinking about the section you brought into our novel workshop that may have functioned as the beginning of it all..and as Mike said..this is not all poetry and in no way are we looking to sacrifice the individual. I do agree with Mike on one account (as many) and can see something published under a collective 'pen name'...I have some thoughts on what that means, but I will not digress into such ramblings now...
Hi Michael (Mike?), nice to meet you! And hello again Will :) I'll try to track down that equation, and yeah I figured it wasn't just for poetry, it's just somethin I've been interested in trying lately. I wrote a new one I like slightly better that I may post. And I love the idea of writing something collectively under one name, I'd be down for that.
ReplyDeleteThe "re-visioning" - it's funny, it's been too much that. I edited this a couple times in different moods that the female character seemed to sap up. Naturally.
Anyway, I was gonna read and give feedback on some of the work on here (still gonna, just tired now), & it got me wondering if you guys ever meet up to actually do this in person? Will, I liked the idea of meeting once in a while to talk about writing, plus it'd be nice for me personally to put faces to names. If you do, let me know!
Speaking of equations and myself, I wrote this as a sum of knowledge equation after will made a post about class culture in our experiential education class:
ReplyDelete∑(from S1 to S14)=(S1*S14!)+(S2*S14!)...+(S14*S14!) would be the sum of all knowledge in the class. Where Student 1 (S1) * S1 would be equivocal knowledge of a student analyzing his own thoughts/work and gaining knowledge from it. And S1 * S2 would be the knowledge gained by student 1 talking/conversing/thinking with student 2 and so on till each student has talked to each other, gaining more insight from each person. This also includes Prof. Noonan as a "student" in the sense that she is learning just as much from the class as we do from her, which may not always be true, but even if its not the same kind of knowledge she's learning, she's still gaining some knowledge (maybe about how to teach better) from her class.
:-D
P.S. - I am assuming knowledge can be best related in mathematical terms by multiplication, because I feel it represents more of the intellectual synthesis that two people getting together and commenting on each others ideas would be like, because I can't imagine that student 1 is really straight up adding student 2's knowledge to them self, but more synthesizing with student 2 to create new knowledge. Or as Wikipedia puts it: "Multiplication is the mathematical operation of scaling one number by another." But what is scaling? "In Euclidean geometry, uniform scaling or isotropic scaling[1] is a linear transformation that enlarges or increases or diminishes objects." So thus, student 1's knowledge is being increased by student 2.