The bird song and street noise and lilt of the subway and recent phone conversations go into our poetry. We are made up of influences, there is no blank page or screen, as has been said many times. Books, projects, obsessions of Lyn Hejinian and Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan, Emily Dickinson and the French OuLiPo and Oscarine Bosquet hover around my book Lines, translate into my writing, as does to be in a Trump regime, to discover oneself early into writing the book to be in a family crisis.
In my poem “November 14” from Lines we start with “Only hour only thought: speech speech.” At the age of 47 I set out to write the book in 47-minute time periods. Roughly an hour, an only hour so to speak, in a field of time dedicated only to thinking/ speaking. Increasingly hard to do this century, with text messages et cetera punctuating thought. So on October 15, 2018, I started on a dictation of the mind so to speak, in which second thoughts are also written, and set my phone timer for each writing session, at the same café for many of the poems. Not written so much as transposed. I determined each poem would be 47 lines, and the lines do not need to be connected to ones before or after, though they could be. There would be 47 poems. The name of each poem is the date it was written. To be in time, in the calendar, to have a project that is a book that is a series. To feel in the momentum of it. To slant into dream, to invite that we survive through the tilt and whir of connecting synapses.
One of the epigraphs to my book is from Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, a book she wrote, with much work leading up to it, on a winter solstice day (published 1971). Mayer lived from 1945-2022 and was associated with the New York School of poets and the Language School. She writes:
I had an idea to write a book that would translate the detail of thought from a day to language like a dream transformed to read as it does, everything, a book that would end before it started in time to prove the day like the dream has everything in it, to do this without remembering like a dream inciting writing continuously for as long as you stand up till you fall down like in a story to show and possess everything we know because having it all at once is performing a magical service for survival by the use of the mind like memory.
Poet Lee Ann Brown who was very close to Mayer (and published her Sonnets with Tender Buttons Press) remembers Mayer saying that she wished she had a machine that would transfer her own thoughts directly onto paper!
And I write in my author’s note to Lines, written over two years:
I was thinking about the notion of a series—of life and consciousness happening in the moment, and being in the speed of it, without judging or forming conclusions, just staying with its language and mental visuals. I felt as though this would make possible a kind of cinema verité of the subconscious through poetic association and its momentum. A book, I thought, could be a cinema of language, in the flow of language that accompanies the mind, in associative movement.
My poem writes “Wake into a glancing dream, do I?” and a couple of lines later “Walk on a planet that melts, moves.” The transformations afoot are too huge for the rational mind to fathom but if one relies on invitations to the mind to roam freely, to wander in the interstices where the media would never know to tamper, we can feel whatever is happening also with a kind of pleasure, we feel alive … we feel especially human.
“Speak speak, breasts what the mouth doesn’t know” I write. For me one of the largest unchosen constraints of life is the patriarchy. Men have chosen everything historically, down to the very languages we write in. The influence of women poets has been crucial for me. For instance, Lyn Hejinian’s constraint for her book My Life in her 37th year, each of 37 poems being 37 lines. Choosing to be hemmed in on one’s own terms. These constraints, because they are chosen, are tremendously liberating, and are portals into the riot of experience. Hejinian (1941-2024) continued the riot over advancing years, adding more lines and (re)publishing My Life and My Life in the Nineties.
There has been an important pattern in my poetry books: to set, and also often, to break the constraints. To realize my early 21st Century realities don’t allow for Sapphic stanzas, or that the rigour of late 20th Century women who were experimental writers had a different relation to time, though they too played with the constraints they set. I set out on a book of 47 poems, and there are 41 in the published version, and most considerably shorter than 47 lines! So much the better, not to conform to the rules, even ones that one sets oneself.
Life is happening. The crises are sometimes too earthshaking for the poems. I work on another book for a while. I tend to my family and various needs. I have friends and a writing group make suggestions of how to revise. The writing is uneven, needs to be shaped over time.
With the publisher Matvei Yankelevich of Winter Editions we settle on my nomination of Lines as a survival manual for a Trump presidency and a family crisis. Each writing and creative project is a survival manual in a way. I look forward to yours.
