Hi Sam, Where would you say collage technique fits into the picture? I have been making a lot of collage poetry for the last 20 years. I do research you could say but in an experimental way. I do odd searches using unlikely word combinations to call up whatever results show up and then copy and paste bits or pieces of phrases and gather them together, then arrange the parts into poems or I might gather from political sources looking for bits and pieces of that rhetoric and draw from the comments people leave. It is all internet based hunt and gather but all collage poetry. One of my books was featured in a Big Data exhibition at a library in England a couple of years ago. And what about writing/image like an exhibit in Geneva I was in called "Scrivere Disegnando - When Language Seeks Its Other" probably the first survey of its kind. There is a published catalog of that available. Then there is Asemic Writing which I call the body language of writing. Some samples of this kind of 'literature'(?) is on my substack. I know all of these are way off the grid of what you are talking about here, but they could be called new categories of writing couldn't they? Or are these examples way off in another area of the arts? Just wondered what you thought.
Your point about research being driven by discovery is spot on. This was the hardest, but most satisfying, thing to teach my students. Good research writing begins with what you don't know, not with a predetermined conclusion that you simply follow to completion. In that way, the old saw about no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader really is the heart of research. It took me a long while to discover this, and I was just hitting my stride with neuroscience/literature research when I left academe. Sigh.
I also want to pick up where Bertus left off, because I don't see writing from memory as distinct at all from reaction or from imagination (which I also don't see as distinct from projection). Anyone who tries to write literary memoir in the Wolff/Karr mode realizes that some level of invention is necessary. Dialogue in memoir would be impossible without invention. Setting details often require some invention, too. And so memory is never recall -- it is a reconstruction and interpretation of the past.
My own memoir writing is also reactive, in that I see it as part of a conversation with the writers I'm reading. Given your wide-ranging reading, Sam, I expect that reaction lies at the heart of most of your writing? Even if we think we are imagining something, aren't we drawing from a well of everything we've read? I've often recommended this to clients who feel stuck or who feel they are less productive than they'd like to be. Start your writing time with a little reading. Prime the pump with what someone else is saying, and chances are good that you'll feel you have something to add.
I wonder where you'd put programmatic writing in your scheme? By that, I mean the kind of post-modern experiment that involves at least some kind of artificial device, like not using the letter "e" or cutting up the story so it can be read in different orders.
I’m trying to think about what you’ve written in the context of two novels I’m currently reading. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, this is a great example of what you call an amalgam: Cather knows what the New Mexico landscape looks and feels like (memory), she must have read memoirs and histories of the region in the mid-19th century (research), and she’s trying to give us what it was like for French priests among a bunch of chili-eating proto-Americans (imagination). A perfect balance.
But that’s a novel from a century ago. A more recent novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is very much the modern novel: satirical, plotless, almost a conceit, seemingly autobiographical, seemingly reactive, like an extended Dylan song (the narrator’s inability to do anything reminds me of the 2nd verse of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”). But part of the fun of a novel like this is seeing if the author can sustain the tone, the reaction if you will. It seems like that’s where Moshfegh’s imagination has to come into play. So far, so good, though.
I wonder if some of the marginalized forms you list at the end are still around, just in different vessels. For example, today’s poem is the song lyric, which is to say it does things that can’t be done in prose (it’s performed, for one thing). And I would argue that while a lot of lyrics feel reactive and autobiographical, they’re probably more than that. For example, the younger dylans like Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey appear to be writing about their daily lives, but are they really? I suspect there’s a lot more invention there than we might give them credit for, if only because the formal elements (rhyme, verse, etc.) force the material to be altered and shaped.
And young Americans consume a huge amount of anime, manga, etc. Isn’t that the fairy tale by another name? And pretty imaginative tales too.
Some of this may just be a matter of technology. Would you rather read a poem to yourself on the page, or hear it sung, with video accompaniment, or even live? And isn’t it fun to see a fairy tale come to life on the screen, the color, the movement, the sound?
Wow, how insightful to read your descriptions. I think it might be interesting to attempt a similar post on how I experience the writing process. You say amalgamation is possible, I feel it as impossible to not use multiple sources. The whole bundle of them. I find it nearly impossible to do strict memory, or pure research based work. To even know where the hell stuff comes from! It may look like a memoir but it always is fiction. Bits glued together with imaginings and wishes, and distortions, and tricks, and lack of words....
I sort of believe imagination is not some extra goodie to add on top but a foundational ingredient for language. Language rests on, comes from the imagined. No proof, just how I experience it....thanks, great read....
Hi Sam, Where would you say collage technique fits into the picture? I have been making a lot of collage poetry for the last 20 years. I do research you could say but in an experimental way. I do odd searches using unlikely word combinations to call up whatever results show up and then copy and paste bits or pieces of phrases and gather them together, then arrange the parts into poems or I might gather from political sources looking for bits and pieces of that rhetoric and draw from the comments people leave. It is all internet based hunt and gather but all collage poetry. One of my books was featured in a Big Data exhibition at a library in England a couple of years ago. And what about writing/image like an exhibit in Geneva I was in called "Scrivere Disegnando - When Language Seeks Its Other" probably the first survey of its kind. There is a published catalog of that available. Then there is Asemic Writing which I call the body language of writing. Some samples of this kind of 'literature'(?) is on my substack. I know all of these are way off the grid of what you are talking about here, but they could be called new categories of writing couldn't they? Or are these examples way off in another area of the arts? Just wondered what you thought.
Your point about research being driven by discovery is spot on. This was the hardest, but most satisfying, thing to teach my students. Good research writing begins with what you don't know, not with a predetermined conclusion that you simply follow to completion. In that way, the old saw about no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader really is the heart of research. It took me a long while to discover this, and I was just hitting my stride with neuroscience/literature research when I left academe. Sigh.
I also want to pick up where Bertus left off, because I don't see writing from memory as distinct at all from reaction or from imagination (which I also don't see as distinct from projection). Anyone who tries to write literary memoir in the Wolff/Karr mode realizes that some level of invention is necessary. Dialogue in memoir would be impossible without invention. Setting details often require some invention, too. And so memory is never recall -- it is a reconstruction and interpretation of the past.
My own memoir writing is also reactive, in that I see it as part of a conversation with the writers I'm reading. Given your wide-ranging reading, Sam, I expect that reaction lies at the heart of most of your writing? Even if we think we are imagining something, aren't we drawing from a well of everything we've read? I've often recommended this to clients who feel stuck or who feel they are less productive than they'd like to be. Start your writing time with a little reading. Prime the pump with what someone else is saying, and chances are good that you'll feel you have something to add.
Fascinating. I really enjoyed this.
I wonder where you'd put programmatic writing in your scheme? By that, I mean the kind of post-modern experiment that involves at least some kind of artificial device, like not using the letter "e" or cutting up the story so it can be read in different orders.
You’ve set my mind abuzz.
I’m trying to think about what you’ve written in the context of two novels I’m currently reading. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, this is a great example of what you call an amalgam: Cather knows what the New Mexico landscape looks and feels like (memory), she must have read memoirs and histories of the region in the mid-19th century (research), and she’s trying to give us what it was like for French priests among a bunch of chili-eating proto-Americans (imagination). A perfect balance.
But that’s a novel from a century ago. A more recent novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is very much the modern novel: satirical, plotless, almost a conceit, seemingly autobiographical, seemingly reactive, like an extended Dylan song (the narrator’s inability to do anything reminds me of the 2nd verse of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”). But part of the fun of a novel like this is seeing if the author can sustain the tone, the reaction if you will. It seems like that’s where Moshfegh’s imagination has to come into play. So far, so good, though.
I wonder if some of the marginalized forms you list at the end are still around, just in different vessels. For example, today’s poem is the song lyric, which is to say it does things that can’t be done in prose (it’s performed, for one thing). And I would argue that while a lot of lyrics feel reactive and autobiographical, they’re probably more than that. For example, the younger dylans like Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey appear to be writing about their daily lives, but are they really? I suspect there’s a lot more invention there than we might give them credit for, if only because the formal elements (rhyme, verse, etc.) force the material to be altered and shaped.
And young Americans consume a huge amount of anime, manga, etc. Isn’t that the fairy tale by another name? And pretty imaginative tales too.
Some of this may just be a matter of technology. Would you rather read a poem to yourself on the page, or hear it sung, with video accompaniment, or even live? And isn’t it fun to see a fairy tale come to life on the screen, the color, the movement, the sound?
Wow, how insightful to read your descriptions. I think it might be interesting to attempt a similar post on how I experience the writing process. You say amalgamation is possible, I feel it as impossible to not use multiple sources. The whole bundle of them. I find it nearly impossible to do strict memory, or pure research based work. To even know where the hell stuff comes from! It may look like a memoir but it always is fiction. Bits glued together with imaginings and wishes, and distortions, and tricks, and lack of words....
I sort of believe imagination is not some extra goodie to add on top but a foundational ingredient for language. Language rests on, comes from the imagined. No proof, just how I experience it....thanks, great read....