Happy July 4th
everyone! Yesterday’s W@1 was
interesting, to say the least: dirty limericks day. Why was it that I was the only writer to take
Curt’s topic suggestion at face value?
For those of you who weren’t there for the “reading of the bawd,” I can
only say it was pretty tame, by and large, but I can’t reprint here any efforts
that I shared. Not on a blog open to the
public!
Speaking of what’s not said, we
discussed topics for future projects and decided on the following for next
week. [1]
Poems leave a lot of blankness on
the page (literally and figuratively), what we often refer to as “white
space.” White space is so much a part of
poetry that we might say that some of a poem’s meaning lies in what’s not imprinted. Emily Dickinson’s poetry has long been read and
celebrated for what’s not there, for what lurks in the pauses and textual
interstices (the m dashes and the very definite [deafening? detonating?] use of
punctuation).
Go to your shelves and find a book
of poems where the entire printable page is utilized typographically, margin to
margin. I am certain you won’t find
many, if any. There are two reasons for
this. One, not many writers of poetry
write poems that present in such slab-like ways (Ashbery has done so, as has C.
K. Williams). And two, not very many
readers collect books (or stop to read poems in journals) that are printed
margin to margin—even when the poems are composed in “lines.” No, most readers of poems expect a poem to
take up relatively little of a page’s real estate. [2]
We’ve approached this idea of
typographical real estate in various ways over the past year and a half through
projects involving lineation, haiku and bright image poetry, the prose poem, so-called
“concrete” poetry, even “list poems” and discussions of how poems end. [3] The question we’re taking up this week is how
a poem’s effect or meaning is established / felt / rendered / implied /
cemented via the “white space” it creates. [4]
Think of it this way. Consider the text you’re reading at this
moment. It’s prose, right? As prose, it utilizes as much of this page’s
blankness—it’s white space—as possible. The
default on my word processing program, by the way, is left-right and top-bottom
margins of one inch. Ordinarily, when I
write prose for Wednesdays@1 consumption, I keep the paragraphs short. I start a new paragraph frequently. In the past, I’ve begun new paragraphs by
inserting a return between them, and have not provided an indentation at the
first word. You see here that paragraphs
are not separated by returns but instead by indentations of 0.25 inches (the
default on my processing program is 0.5).
Does this technique change the
meaning of the statements I’m making?
Does it affect how you interact
with the text?
Does it matter?
Each instance of an indentation
creates (or declines to utilize) white space, the page’s natural real
estate. Each instance also signals,
typographically, that a new unit of meaning follows. [5] And each uses exactly the same amount of
return (0.25 in.) to do so. But look
more closely at the three preceding paragraphs.
Each creates (or declines to utilize) increasing amounts of the page’s
real estate in succession. Does this
change the meaning of the overall text of what I’m writing here? Does it affect how you’re interacting with
the text? Does it matter?
I think that when it comes to
poetry, this kind of textual-typographical play does matter, very much so. Here are some examples of what I’m talking
about, taken from poems you’ve shared with the W@1 group over the past months. I’ve replaced the meaningful phonemes and morphemes (typographical letters, units of sound) with relatively meaningless notations—minims.
Bennett’s “Recompense”
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Doug’s “Duet # I”
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Note above that the short lines interleaved throughout Doug's poem are actually continuations of the line above, wrapped due to lack of real estate to utilize for the entire line.
Janet’s “Playing God Today”
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I don’t know, is this even
meaningful? Perhaps not much, but it
does matter. It matters because of the
amount of page space utilized in each example—the middle one, Doug’s poem,
could pass for a standard prose paragraph; it takes up page real estate the way
prose writing might. I am betting that
one of the many things your brain computes when it gets this space utilization
“signal” from Doug’s poem is “prose.” Yet
Bennett’s and Janet’s “poems,” for all their similar graphical features—they “waste space” from a prose
point of view—use
page space quite differently, line by line. What luxury!
Here is the project for next
Wednesday. Grab a poem you’ve already
completed (or simply write a new one!) and consider its footprint on the page. Ignore the text of the poem, but focus on the
amount of white space that is left undisturbed by each line and/or
paragraph/stanza. [6] Then change the relationship between
graphical text and surrounding white space.
You can do this by moving words around between or among lines, by adding
or subtracting returns between lines/stanzas, and by adding or subtracting
spaces between words and syllables within a line. Have some fun with it. Break your poem! Punch new holes in the page! Then try to put it back together in some way
that is different from the original, but not gratuitously dismembered.
Give some thought to how you interact
with the poem as you do this, whether it changes the poem for you for better or
worse, whether it gives you new insight into the poem, etc.
Select at least one example of an
altered version and bring it along with the original to our next session. Have fun!
[1]
The others we discussed were “a return to rhyme”; “something seasonal”;
“grammar, good and/or bad”; “articles & other parts of speech.”
[2]
Poems made up of wide lines, that take up all or most of a page’s available
real estate, test our notion of “poem,” right?
They are “prose” poems. They are
“speech” but not song.
[4] I
am asking you to exercise your “negative capability” here: to see not the
imprint upon the page, but the “hole in the blankness of the page” that the
imprint creates. Not only to see it, but
to feel it as well, in terms of rhythm, pace, sound, and to consider from there
how the poem makes you feel when you “read” it not so much as meaningful
language as “lack of” or an “absence of” white space. I suggested that this will be an experiment
for us; I know it will feel weird. And I
bet it will contribute to your understanding of the poem.
[5]
Newspaper text violates this “rule” of one paragraph-one unit of meaning,
partly because columns of newsprint are narrow and long, making it difficult
for the eye to follow the text. One
sentence paragraphs are common in this type of media.
[6]
Like a field of freshly fallen snow?
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