Over and over

A passing thought, and one which I hope to return to, on repetition, and on lists.

I've been reading and re-reading Georges Perec's "Species of Spaces" (the first act of repetition here) over the last few years, as I circle around a poem, or series of poems rather, nearing completion now. Those with a passing familiarity with Perec will be aware of his membership of the OuliPo, the constrained, e-less novel La Disparition, the sustained brilliance of La Vie a mode d'emploi. What interests me more about species of spaces is the number of esssays and pieces dealing with acts of ordering. Placing things into lists (his list of everything eaten in a single year, which something tells me is an idea that has recently been re-visited; the lists of ordering all the items on his desk ), or taking a conceit and repeating it.

It is this last which provided the genesis of the piece I'm working on at the moment. "245 postcards in real colour" is a text which is simply that. A sequence of postcards.

"We've landed near Tropea. Magnificent weather and dinner by candlelight. There's a good dozen of us here. Love."

"A big hello from Inverness! Weather good for the time of year. Decent nosh. Good for the calf muscles. Many regards."

"We're at the Hotel Dardanella. Noshing and lazing about. I'm getting fat. Back beginning of September."

Taken in isolation each one of these postcards is nothing. A few banal sentences. But taken altogether, the 245 postcards have a hypnotic effect. There are no shocks or surprises, each is relentlessly quotidian, but put togwther they become something altogether other, they become a poem, a hymn to endless holidays if approached from one end, an uneasy, unsettling critique from the other (there's something disturbing about constant good spirits, after all, you're always waiting for the crack). It's like listening to the subtle tonal shifts in a Can track, or a piece by Steve Reich. The repetition is constant, the sentiment is constant, but the actual phrasing shifts from postcard to postcard.

Needless to say, what I've done with this idea is something a bit different. Firstly because I would never have the confidence of a Georges Perec to simply pace these tiny texts in agglomeration without comment. It's his genius to do that sort of thing. Take the by turns amusing and worrying "Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four" which starts off "Nine beef consommes, one iced cucumber soup, one mussel soup" and goes all the way through, with line breaks for a new category of food ("Two haddocks, one sea-bass, one skate, one sole, one tuna") down to the final, haiku-like:

"N coffees
one tisane
three Vichy waters"

Viewed as a whole, the year's worth of food looks simultaneously somehow too much and too little. It revolts and intrigues.Youo wonder how your year would have been if you'd eaten prcisely that. You fear how it would look if you logged your own year this way ("three cold leftover curries, five reheated suasage rolls, half a bowl of the kid's Rice Crispies"). This is the effect of the repeptitoin, in this case of an idea, a simple idea, simply presented, the food is relentless.

The second reason I'm doing something a bt different is becuase Georges has already done it, obviously, so it's a bit dull to simply repeat what he did. For the act of repetion to work down years, one needs a little variation.

In search of an aesthetic

As opposed to "in search of anaesthetic" which would be a different sort of post altogether.

This is in essence a continuation of the previous post. Though the blog's lain fallow for a couple of months (for which the day job is entirely culpable) the actual act of writing itself has, thankfully, not. But the questions implicit in the last post need, I think to be made explicit. And after a brief bit of head scratching, i boiled it down to two basic questions. This is what I have.

What is my writing for?

An easy one, this. It exists becuase it must. Not writing is not an option, it never has been. So having got the warm up out of the way, time to deal with the second question.

What does my writing stand for?

A subtle difference here, and the crux of my problems over the last few wilderness years. I have always mistrusted conviction. I have never been of a "school" as such and my taste is fairly catholic. It either sucks, or it doesn't, is largely my view (and why I never get asked to do any reviews, I imagine). Looking back over the writing accrued over the last few weeks I don't really say anything in the wway of an overaching aesthetic. I referred in the last post to my first chapbook, L39, and I recall well that at the time one comment I often recieved was that someone would now I had written that poem without being told. I don't know that holds true today. there are spare, spartan pieces, silly pieces, formal (ish) pieces and ones which were clearly written just to get something down. There's a lt of landfill but there are a few worth working on and polsihing up, and the one thing they have in common is nothing.

But I wonder of this lack of an aesthetic is actually an end in itself. I wonder whether having an instantly recognisable voice is necessarily such a desirable thing. I suspect that my worries about this stem from a suspicion that if you aren't wriitng in a style "your own" you are writing in a style which is, be extension, somebody elses. You are a pasticheur (which is what I felt I became OF MYSELF when writing L39, talk about painting yourself into a corner).

So, what DOES it stand for? If there's no definable style, what exactly do I hang my hat on? Well, I do note recurring themes, a lot of the small town weirdness stuff I tackled in my earlier work is still there, it's simply being approached differently. The procedural work I became interested in post L39 is still extant (there's an ongoing, highly procedural poem in the works at the moment). There are also a lot of love poems, and always have been, though they're always pretty oblique.

So there we have it. Following on from the unmanifesto we have an unpoetics. A not much to work with, a no flag to rally round. It'll do to be going on with.