Streaming poetry (4.1.22)

Somebody used the phrase "stream of consciousness" in relation to one of the poems we shared at a recent Wednesdays@One salon.  Was this just to describe the feel of the poem, a criticism of the poem, or a technical assessment?

It occurred to me at the time, and still does as I write this, that we at W@1 have no solid definition of "stream of consciousness" as a poetic style or sub-genre, at least none that we can agree on as a group.  It's rather like that famous (and weaselly) definition of pornography, meaning, it resides in the eye and ear of the beholder.

But can stream of consciousness be defined formally?  Is it a literary sub-genre?  I dived into my library to find out.  And so far, I find nothing.  So I jumped to Wikipedia for some basic facts.  

Daniel Oliver, a 19th Century psychologist, coined the term in a book titled First Lines of Physiology: Designed for the Use of Students of Medicine.  He defines it this way:

If we separate from this mingled and moving stream of consciousness, our sensations and volitions, which are constantly giving it a new direction, and suffer it to pursue its own spontaneous course, it will appear, upon examination, that this, instead of being wholly fortuitous and uncertain, is determined by certain fixed laws of thought, which are collectively termed the association of ideas.

Three observations, to begin, that may impact our understanding for our own poetry writing.  One is that it's a medical term, or was once, describing not a state of mind but a process of thinking.  One is that SOC is spontaneous, not rationalized or crafted thinking.  Another is that stream of consciousness isn't the same as "free writing" or "automatic writing," much less non-formal writing.  Stream of consciousness "is determined by certain fixed laws of thought."  It's a way of thinking.

The first important literary use of this "way of thinking" was in the novels of Dorothy Richardson (see the same Wiki entry on SOC as above).  Not only did this writer write in the SOC mode, but she completed a series of thirteen semi-autobiographical novels using the mode!

The Wiki page defines SOC as a literary method in this way:

Stream of consciousness is a narrative device that attempts to give the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue . . . or in connection to their actions. Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in thought and lack of some or all punctuation. Stream of consciousness and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic monologue and soliloquy, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third person, which are chiefly used in poetry or drama. In stream-of-consciousness, the speaker's thought processes are more often depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself); it is primarily a fictional device.

Some famous practitioners of SOC: Joyce, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Pynchon.  (I've been reading the first novels of Remembrance of Things Past for the past six months or so.  I'm here to tell you that SOC is very much there, and it's a literary device, not a free-writing exercise!)

And what about poetry?  I'd be willing to make an argument that all poetry that "flows" or appears to "flow" from one thought or expression to the next, is SOC writing.  I'd also go so far as to say that the poetic element of all poetry (of all writing, for that matter) is this "flowiness."  This could include large portions of The Iliad, but perhaps less in The Aeneid.  It might describe many parts of Song of Myself, but not much other American poetry written in the 19th Century, not even by Whitman.  It would certainly better describe the method used in W.C. Williams' Kora in Hell than even his epic Paterson.

And as you might deduce from the examples I cite in the paragraph above, SOC is apparent, not "real." It's a style, meaning it is fabricated.  To believe that Joyce just let his mind "flow" while writing Ulysses is not to understand literary art.  For long portions of that novel Joyce may have tapped into a psychic stream of images and thoughts, and drawn from that, but the writing is thoroughly shaped in the end.

One key element of SOC is audience, or lack of audience.  Apparently.  Unlike dramatic monologue or soliloquy, SOC is not consciously addressed to a hearer or interlocutor by either the "speaker" or the author.  It's a record of an internal monologue.  And when I say a "record," I mean a shaping of the constant flow or stream of images and thoughts that we experience continually, even while we sleep.

A poem, even one written in the SOC style (I might say, especially one done in that style), abstracts from the mind's continual image-thought activity.  A poem done in SOC is still art, meaning, it is intentional, purposeful, shaped, delimited, as it must be if it's to be understood as art.

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What about our project for next week?  Let's try to write poems in the mode of stream of consciousness.  Perhaps easier said than done.  Our first impulse might be to narrativize our poem (I'm talking to you, June!).  But stream of consciousness is not storytelling, per se.  So steer clear of "this happened, then that, then the other."  A related impulse to the narrative is the purely descriptive approach (I'm talking to you, Suzy!), which you'll also want to de-emphasize.  Descriptive writing--much contemplative writing falls into this category--points the mind or our consciousness outside ourselves to some object or scene that we can describe minutely because it is frozen in time (and sometimes place): a landscape, a still life, etc.  Stream of consciousness suggests its own objective: to write from the subjective point of view, to abstract from a constantly moving, changing thing: your mind at work.  Yet another impulse might be to speak to someone, to address an audience (And I'm talking to you, Curt!), which injects rhetoric into our writing, meaning, having an argument to make or an agenda to accomplish.  Think of SOC as non-rhetorical writing, that is, writing that does not seek to move a listener or reader.

Now, it looks like I've eliminated all of the writing styles that we're accustomed to at W@1!  I will add one more: no strict literary forms, such as rhyme, formal metrical cadences; no sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, terza rima, uniform stanzas.  (I am talking to you, Judy, Bennett!) These will only encourage you to "make sense," when what you're after is to steer your internal image-thought activity into a new "word flow," kind of the way the Army Corps of Engineers steers a flood into a stream.  Take your internal flood plain and give it some banks and pitch.

But how?  That's the experiment!  I'll share a tip from teaching days.  When I taught freshman comp in my early days, I asked my students to do the following.  

1. Free write (also known as automatic writing).  That is, open your notebook and just start writing down whatever comes to mind.  Don't stop to correct or edit.  Don't "develop" a thought.  Just keep pen to paper (or these days, fingers to keyboard) and write.  Don't bother with lines or paragraphs or even sentences.  Don't even stop to think about what to write next; if you get stuck, rewrite the last few words of what you just wrote down, again and again, until you get unstuck, then move on.  Do this for ten minutes.  And remember, no pauses to collect your thoughts!
2. Focus write.  Where free writing is largely unfocused, focused writing narrows your field of consciousness to some general notion, like warmth in a room, humidity in the air, noises off, your own posture while writing, a mood.  It's more like meditative writing in which you pay closer attention to what's immediately around you, what's distant, what's moving, what's still, etc.  You aren't commenting on any of it and you aren't attempting a detailed "photograph" of it.  In Zen terms, you are merely acknowledging its presence.  Whatever you focus on will come from your ten minutes of free writing.  Do this for ten minutes.
3. Associate.  That is, "sample" phrases and passages from your focused writing, sorting for like to like or posit to opposite or "leap" to "leap."  Did one thought or image in your free and focused writing lead to some other thought or image, regardless whether the two are logically connected?  Great!  Abstract them from the focused or free writing.  Do this for twenty minutes.
4. Make.  (Note: I never used the term "make" with my frosh students; we were after expository essays in the end, not poems.)  Another way of saying "make" in this context is "shape it."  Your goal is to retain the feel of the flow of steps 1 and 2 above, using the groupings of thoughts/images from step 3, while giving the content some shape or form (again, no formal forms like rhyme, strict meter, etc.).  In this step, you might be looking for ways to lineate the material--through rhythmical units, enjambment, repetition, jump-cutting, and so on.  This step may also lead to a re-ordering of your material.  Feel free to move units around, up or down the lyrical stream, as it were.

Do this, and your brain will feel it in the end.  It'll feel fagged and maybe even a little achey.  It should!  You'll be doing the equivalent of exercising your biceps in a new way.  That's because what this project is about is process, not product.  And that's because SOC writing is a process designed to tap your own internal monologue for art.

Have fun!