1:48 PM, 8 Mar 2016. I want not to string words together into phrases and sentences yet. I want to pursue the silence between words, to observe words in and of themselves.
If one just keeps saying things, one will have said the things that one wanted to say.
If I write poetry, I realise that I am writing poetry.
And then
it becomes possible to do something else. I realise
there’s a fine line between writing poetry
and doing something else.
There is first of all a system. But
it has to be
a nice system. Often I will have created
some not very nice systems. A good system can bring out the best parts
of a Source Text.
A good system might include politics and society and culture and history in the output
in interesting and sensible
ways
Being
Sensible
It’s hard to imagine that building a form
to work in
is so complicated
but it IS.
It must be complicated so it can be simple.
Once you or me has found the right system then: BINGO!
or big no
The Police beat them
No wastage of language: yes.
No new language: yes.
Less language: yes.
Saroyanism? Maybe. Less language used more.
Mine poetry currently is dedicated to the narrowing of vocabulary.
I want to use less words more times
wonder
about the
system
system
system
of persons
Marcel
Brood
thaers
Hanne Darboven Pavanne . . . (wonders Yourselfs)
Poem: to be sung out with the background music of Henri Gorecki’s ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ or Richard Strauss’s ‘Metamorphosis’
2:18 PM, 11 Nov 2015.
Score: On Words
I want no longer to write lines.
I want to write words.
Words are enough.
I don’t need anything else, I don’t need to put words together,
all I need is words by themselves,
on their own. It is hard
enough understanding what a word means, let alone
a whole lot of words put together into lines, phrases, sentences.
It gets too confusing.
The best thing in the world for me
is putting a word into a cabinet or a box and focusing on it.
Not it in relation to other words,
but just it, it by itself.
I want to know what a word likes to do
when it is alone.
Then, once we have focused on a single word, then, maybe, we can begin putting words together again.
Then it can start having social relationships.
Though it still was before (I think).
Words, maybe dates and the weather.
These three, pitched in perfect poise: all I need (at this moment)
Afterscore: on the CHORASTIC Method
1. The CHORASTIC method is a practice I have been developing since the Winter of 2012. It is derived from my work with source-texts, and my idiosyncratic study of Jackson Mac Low’s diastic methods. The intention of CHORASTIC method is to provide an ‘x-ray image’ of the source text that attends to the choral axes of texts, their vertical and horizontal tendencies.
2. The composer begins by taking one word from each line of a source text (preferably a text with ‘choral’ tendencies, or something multivocal, like a comments thread), running down the page vertically, and then laying these words out horizontally. These initial lines will therefore resemble sentences, with slight gaps between each word.
3. Once an adequate reading-through has been conducted using vertical striations of the text, the CHORASTIC writer then takes horizontal striations from the same source texts (preferably different pages) by taking every three or four word from each line, and laying them out vertically on the page in columns. If you are reading through a Penguin novel (as I did Patrick White’s Voss), there will usually be about three or four columns, but sometimes a rare 5th column, where a line has been very long.
4. Readers and writers might choose to read-through an entire source-text, or simply parts of it, depending on their level of dedication to the CHORASTIC method. The use of multiple source-texts is to be avoided. The key is focus. If a source-text is very long that is not a reason to avoid reading-through it in its entirety.
5. A lot of air is to be given between lines and between words, to emphasize the separateness of words.
