A NOTE ON THE NEW



Of late, I have been thinking of where my writing should turn next. What form should I work in? What strategies should I employ? What tone? What content? What context?

It’s often been an understanding of mine that in the past there are paths that were mapped out in a particular, intriguing forest and yet that forest was left behind and little traveled again.

For instance, the forests of Kafka come to mind.

I don’t think that I would ever not want more “Kafka” stories. I don’t think that that zone of inquiry has been treated enough at all. If some person were to move around with shuffling, mugging twins again, for instance, I would love to read that novel, those stories. Because it could never be Kafka’s life within the stories, making those individual decisions. That’s the difference, and that’s all that an old zone needs.

Perhaps this is coming to me now because I feel the same way about Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

There are many Winesburg, Ohios. But they are different as well, each unto themselves. Likewise, Anderson should not get the final say-so on who can write about strangeness in small towns again, simply because he wrote about one so fully.

There is really not a new.

A new is a larger leap only from a previous model, but the previous model rests inside of it. For instance, Joyce’s Ulysses used the frame of Homer’s The Odyssey. It’s a modern reworking.

In poetry, to use one example, Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets is a rigorous rug-pull of pre-existing habitats.

Or, especially in some versions of experimental poetry, we see a particular theory—a form in itself—being applied to another format, poetry. Is the theory the real new? Why is the poetry considered new when the theory is the “from” from which it came? And that so-called “original” theory rests on usually the rebuking of a pre-existent theory, which itself, if art or writing tells us anything, will be rebuked.

People like to think things are true and make links to other things like this.

There really is not a new.

The current models of experimental poetry that seem to be discussed at some length and with some notice are precisely to this point.

Flarf, of course, re-imagines by re-ordering phrases from the awkward and ambivalent and violently “cute” Google clutter of our new Machine Age. This is a re-using, but it is still interesting.

I am not saying anything new here, as anyone who is anyone (or who isn’t anyone) can point out.

As well, some Conceptualist writings like to re-format old formats. Goldsmith’s Day is one example, where one asks one’s self (with good will extended): “Was the thought of the work more interesting than the execution?” Was the book actually necessary? Might one now simply employ a screen reader, like JAWS, and have it read the New York Times’ digital text and alt tags aloud? How new would that new be to the blind?

I should also point out, once more, that I am not saying anything new here.

What is underlying all of this sense of new is the arrangement of it. This is the curious case of chimp-beings—how we tweak things, or apply something from one supposedly distinct world into (or onto) another, and this is metaphor transfer (or some such thing).

Arrangement and execution and context.

Re-Placements (re-place-meants) of older models.

This is my interest.

(The same tree in the Winter is the same tree in the Spring.

And not.

The same tree in the park is different by the river.)

Reading at Green Arcade Bookstore, San Francisco, on November 14, 2009.

Geisttraum influences/proportionally unknown and/or inexact (and/or all-together false):

Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio) + Roberto Bolaño (for instance, the true stories used in 2666) + Nathalie Sarraute (her Tropisms) + David Markson (perhaps some of the style of his later books--Wittgenstein's Mistress forward) + Hervé Guibert (his fantastic Ghost Image) + Michael Lesy (Wisconsin Death Trip) + (..............) =

A winner doesn't shiver.