Hitch and turn

Sundays are my favorite. It's the time of my week I allow myself a kind of stillness in the space of the day to contemplate and stretch and read and cook and do whatever it is I'd like. I suppose I'm conventional in that way.

I spent some time yesterday listening to the absolutely dreamy Solitude Trilogy by Glenn Gould. I also watched The Weather Underground, which of course makes me think about poetry. (Documentaries do that to a girl - all that carefully constructed and overlapping language, palimpsestic discourse.)



I have been really struggling with how to negotiate my relationship to poetry lately. I haven't written anything that I would consider finished or polished in far too long. I've been re-reading old work with disdain (I know this isn't that strange an occurrence, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant).

On the other hand, I can feel the influence of the kind of thinking poetry engenders in most aspects of my life more keenly than I have in some time. Yesterday, I worked on a sound project for hours - recording it, considering how best to score it. What I have in mind, could, indeed, read like poetry, I think, but it's footing there isn't secure. I'm picturing something that would owe a great deal to a Benjamin J. Mansavage Klein score: a layered thing that you peel back and reveal to yourself in shifting ways each time. Another possibility would be to set it up as telescopic web text.

The difficulty that this little sound project is so clearly a component of is my tendency of late to write very little that isn't part of a kind of closed circuit. I can imagine this being quite a lovely sort of new media, multi-disciplinary sound poem, but I am making it for a very particular audience: me and one other person. I've been feeling similarly about the Charcot poems, too. I begin to suspect that they comprise an entire book that I wrote to myself...or perhaps to multiple selves (a self of circa 1995-1999, a self at a specific future point, et al). My insomnia series is definitely not for public consumption, but it's a really compelling project, nonetheless.

When I was a teenager I was adamant that essays and poetry were close kin, that there is a kind of hitch of logic or turn of mind that occurs in both, when they are successful. I find myself, more and more these days, full of hitch, full of turn, but lacking a way of wedding those steps to some kind of appropriate means of public consumption.

Good idea or lack of sleep?

It could well be the lack of sleep that's behind this idea, but I am really taken with it.

One of the theories about what was so unnerving about hysteria in the 19th century was that it disrupted language, so that signifiers and referents would become blatantly unhitched in the mouths of the patients. This relationship to language was part of the reason I wanted to write the series of poems in the first place. What better than poetry to deal with this sort of fear?!



I've struggled off and on with insomnia for my as much of my life as I can remember. It wasn't really until I was older, though, that it started to make me panic when I couldn't sleep. As a child, it just seemed like one of those things that sometimes happens - and it allotted me time to myself that was still and quiet, something I've always already needed anyway.

I hardly slept at all last night, maybe and hour and a half - 5:30-7:00 a.m. It's 9:44 p.m. right now.

Halfway through this morning I had the idea to start of cycle of poems only written when extremely exhausted. Exhaustion unhinges my ability to use language (I can't tell you how hard I am concentrating now to write this!) just enough that interesting things begin to happen. I'm not certain that the poems from these cycles would end up finished in themselves, but they are certainly things I'd be hard pressed to come up with in other states.

So, here's the idea that makes me excited. What if I created a new section of the hysteria/Charcot book based on these insomnia poems? They certainly mirror the radical disjunction of the language the patients used (at least insofar as how it's represented in the medical journals).

It seems like a really good idea now. I shall have to put it to the test when I've slept.

on writing; on not writing; on reading; on old and new beds

When I started this blog, it was with the intention of cataloguing and developing my ideas for poems and poetry projects when they were at their most embryonic. I've been quiet for a while now. It doesn't mean I haven't been thinking.


[This is me reflecting. Sorry. Bad pun.]

I've been reading a lot these days. I've been delving back into Charcot territory. In a turn that probably deserves a poem of its own, I uncovered some articles I had copied when I was researching that series this past weekend when I was dismantling my old bed. Ever since I moved out of 5 Willard Street, I'd been sleeping on the same, hard, rickety twin sized bed that I used as an adolescent. Well, now, thanks to my lovely parents I have a grown-up's bed.

But back to the old bed for a moment - it's the one on which I lost my virginity; it's the one that supported me through any number of teenaged traumas; it's the one on which I was inclined to martyr myself (in a manner of speaking) after the dissolution of my last relationship.

And it was during the dismantling of this bed - this carriage-of-so-much - that I found the unfinished aspects of my hysteria research. Have at it, Freud!

So, in addition to the satyrical self-psychoanalytic poem (maybe it should be a limerick!) I'll write about this, these are the things I've been considering adding to the series:
- a poem for/on Ada and Byron
- a poem on hysteria in Restoration comedies
- a poem that (somehow) messes with the accepted structural elements of bourgeois respectability
- inasmuch as hysteria can often be imitative, a poem in which the sufferer bears symptoms that match the mercury poisoning her husband would have contracted from producing daguerreotypes
- a poem on Charcot on art (based on Les Demoniaques dans l'art)
- a poem on Linda Santo and her daughter Audrey, focusing on the attitudes of Audrey's body
- I think there ought to be something, too, about epidemiology in the book (I just haven't figured out how I want to tackle that...)


What do you think, Charcot?