First a bit of background about the original creation of the work: In 1962 Jackson Mac Low created a series of poems called the Light Poems. He started with an alphabetized table of 208 words for light cross-referenced with the letters from his name and the name of his wife at the time, Iris Lezak. He also included the initials from playing cards, assigned numbers to the suits and shuffled the deck to determine the order of the words from the chart he would use to create his poems.
Later,
he divided these styles into further categories, one being what he referred to
as deterministic, part of his realizing that there’s always some intention or
determinism in creation. For this he
used a source text and a seed text and basically translated from the source.
While he realized that neither method could really eliminate the individual
ego, he still wanted to create that illusion.
An aria, aside from being a type of opera, is also a repeated pattern that can stand alone. This seems to go well with the idea of the poem I wanted to create, the Dream House composition and structure created by Young and Zazeela and the idea of the poem having its own voice, a pattern that can stand alone.
I began with a series of images that flowed through my mind about white and winter. I wrote Session 1: Starched Afternoons and Sedative Evenings. This session included a total of 548 words, 339 of which are unique; the 548 words are divided into 229 function words and 319 content words. A function word is a word with little lexical meaning or a primarily grammatical function. A content word is a word with a lexical meaning.
I used the first session as a source text for the rest of the sessions of this poem, which were seed texts. I plundered the next session from session one (with a bit of cheating) and then rearranged by random order, cutting up the words and picking them out of a hat and putting them into a table of ten columns and one hundred rows, then entering the words in forwards horizontal, backwards horizontal, downwards vertical column by column, and upwards vertical order to create the remaining sessions.
Something I’m exploring through the poem’s repetition and unusual juxtapositions is to create a dream effect something that causes a hypnotic and mesmerizing state, which leads to images lie beneath the surface. I was inspired by the concept of the deep image, a term coined by the American post modernist, Jerome Rothenberg , who was influenced by surrealistic poetry, particularly the poetry of Lorca, based on the Duende, a word that means ghosts and magic but can also be extrapolated to mean a deep knowledge.
What made me decide to transform the poem into a novel? When I reread the work, I noticed that embedded in the manuscript were qualities of stories, there were knights and Valkyries. There was movement. There was a thread of escape and a quest for a sanctuary. I think it was these elements of story that intrigued me. I wanted to keep the fragment and accumulatory nature of the manuscript but add some form of narrative.
In Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Books, 2000), Robert Gluck asks about the writer’s role. How do our cultures describe themselves? Which one of us is left out of the description? In Sessions, I felt there was a character, an actor and respondent to what happens in the work. Elements of plot were in the poem, but not obvious or necessary. There were two catalysts, two men, missing direct reference.
I realized that the work had autobiographical elements. I have been reluctant to include these because they aren’t easy to talk about. I realize that what I am writing is a version. Does a narrative have to be true? “[…] story-making is art, a language art that deals, ultimately with the positioning of the storyteller and her work in the aesthetic (re)production of social relationships.” Gail Scott, Biting
What is my position? How does the reader decide to accept my choices on what to leave in, what to leave out? Why decide to fuck around with time and structure, voice? In Biting, Kathy Acker refers to Julio Cortázar and his resistance to the idea that everything can be described and explained according to some harmonious governance of world order as 19th century realism and naturalism movement of the novel portrayed. I can’t write in that way for this work. I have to mess with the text because they way I see the world is not as harmonious or just, and history has its versions, can be revised and distorted. Again from Acker, “the real lies in the connection between the ’real’ events and the holes, the silences. In the slippages. Slippages into what?”
She talks about time, the movements between clock time and chaos. For a piece of writing there is a time triad: the time the writer takes to write the draft, the interim between draft and finished work and the fictive time of the work itself. Since writing the initial long poem in 2008 over a short period of 48-hours, I had a near-death health crisis, my mother died, I realized I was not straight, and I understood/accepted finally, that I am a feminist.
All
these aspects of myself are going to be part of the adaptation, whether by
intent or just because. So far I haven’t paid much attention to fictive time.
In fact, that aspect is very incoherent in the work and I’m ok with that for
now. I am ok with letting things go unsaid or unexplained as well. Some things
will be revelatory only to readers and not even to me. The balance between
intent and magic has always interested me as a writer. When to edit, when to
let things go? I doubt I make the decisions that literary convention dictates.
Lydia Davis writes about fragments as ruins. I take that to mean that the narrator of the text I am writing is not whole, but broken. How can someone who is broken write anything but fragments?
“fragments comparable to the incoherent utterances of voiced grief…in the silences, the grief is alive.” Davis p. 36.
Barthes: “incoherence is preferable to distorting order.”
Lancan: “I see only from one point of view,” but in my existence I am looked at from all sides. p. 42
“Pronouns are known as shifters because they are by nature unstable linguistic units, referring not to people but to moving circumstances of speech and audition, visibility and perception. As such they are fictional opportunities, unlike names they permit a character to be subject and object, to ride the Wheel of Person, speak and be spoken of with equal weight, inhabit simultaneity.” Aaron Shurin p. 42
The first mention of the I in the original Sessions poem occurs in “Starched Afternoons and Sedative Evenings” part 1: it is a question: “what have I lost/locked in a fairytale?”
When creating the novel, I split the I into I and she. I thought of adding a name, Amaranth, for the grain and its strong red, I wanted a weed, pigweed. Something neglected and underestimated, but I ended up using A. instead, short for Amaranth, and also the first letter of my own first name. I added visual poems to introduce each section: a titled A, a broken A, an A with visible cracks and possibly ice running through the body of the letter, petrified A, A numb with cold and memory.
“Normative pronoun usage subjects self and other to power/dominance models of unity and authority, of he over she and it beneath them.” Aaron Shurin
Renee Gladman talks of the wandering and stuttering I as different from the main character in a novel. She says that fiction is too burdened by a system of expectations. Even when adapting Sessions, I felt I had to give it a plot and a direction, as if those things were as unavoidable as gravity. I like when Gladman talks about giving up authority for wonder. She makes reference to the I that questions, that doesn’t have all the answers. I think that’s the only way I could write, whatever the genre. My protagonists never do have all the answers.
I worry that my she is voiceless. How can I give her a voice? How can she give me the ability to give her a voice? I think again of Canisia Lubrin’s the Dyzgraphyxst and JeJune.
If the poem is the frame for the moment, perhaps prose, particularly fiction, can be a structure to hold the past – thoughts on reading Pamela Lu’s piece on how poets often suspend time. “Fiction offers me the chance to follow a version of the unknown to an eventual outcome and see all the intermediate consequences of actions taken and decisions made earlier in the story.” p. 53
Lu talks about “continuous retrospection.” I wonder if the I and the she are fully conscious of what they are leaving behind or if they have any idea of what they are running toward. I am suddenly self-conscious about how strongly I have worked to create some semblance of order in this work. I am bothered by it. It’s not as accurate as a police report. Does it have to be? What part has to be a factual description and what part can be a translation of emotions? Who am I betraying if it is not accurate? My father died in the 90s. My mother a few years ago. And she knew everything. Other family members? I count on the fact that they do not read my work. This may or may not be the case.
Is inability to be faithful to actual events, state of mind, personalities, others…the tragedy of the writer? How can other writers believe in fidelity to fact, to emotion, to experience? Do they? Is there a Greek or Roman philosopher I should be quoting right now?
“Narrative mediates the use of social force in the world, determining what can and can’t be said while consolidating dominant stories and truths. But imagine what it might mean to lay one’s body down at the fault – the body as seismograph, registering the crisis – disrupting the smooth transmission of training (discipline) that otherwise conceals the wound.” Rob Halpern, p. 56
How much of the original Sessions was an act of concealment? How is an attempt to turn it into a narrative an act of uncovering, of revealing?
I have tried to write about my childhood before. For years I didn’t. I couldn’t. It appeared in the form of the occasional line of poetry, the image of a wrought-iron gate, a tiger lily, chasing light, but nothing more. I say it appeared because I notice this now only by rereading older work, such as my chapbook I Owe Saint Hildegard the Light (unarmed press).
I found myself growing both uncomfortable with other poets’ accounts of idyllic childhoods. I kept scoffing at the notion. Disbelieving. Eventually it came to me that it was odd that I felt angry about what other writers chose to write about or how they depicted childhood. What did it matter to me? I realized I needed to write about my own. But sharing was another matter.
I sent the poems to publications I knew wouldn’t take them. I entered them into contests they had no hope in winning or even being shortlisted in. I applied for grants I didn’t think I would get. But I did. I got a grant to work on those poems. I ended up extracting a series called Lament: Doll, which I sent to a publisher I felt I could trust: Ethel Zine and Micropress, run by Sara Lefsyk, who describes herself on the press’ site as “is a monster-goddess of darkness and protection. A bird of minor importance, she collects Ethels and sews them together with her sword and talons.” https://www.ethelzine.com/about
Obviously Sara was the right person to entrust with this work. I gave Sara Lament: Doll and she made a sweet and tiny chapbook with imperfectly sewn seams that didn’t always contain the pages and that is exactly what I wanted, a little secret book to be hidden in the pockets of those who’d undergone childhood trauma.
All of my trauma took place in the summertime to the point where I have always felt the urge to run away in the summer. I set Sessions in the winter. Winter has felt safer to me than summer.
I gave Lament : Doll to a few friends. Some commented and some didn’t. I was afraid to put this chapbook in anyone’s hands. Most said nothing at all.
I read Beth Gobie’s Scars of Light and Sandra Ridley’s Silvja and felt like there were others, kindreds, who didn’t have idyllic childhoods. I wanted to write for those. At the same time, a voice kept saying that what happened to me wasn’t so bad. I dealt with this with a therapist who told me that I am a survivor.
In the original work I had no thought of audience, not realizing that I was already the audience for what I was writing and this had an effect – to be both writer and reader. Halpern: “The error is in believing in a view from nowhere – faultless, unembodied and without history – as if we weren’t ourselves one audience of the thing we are struggling to know.” p. 60.
In their essay, Nathanaël writes “I would like to argue in favour of not going anywhere.” p. 68. She talks about how the body is in exile, its displacement and echo – the circular repetition. I think about my need to add forward motion to the text, and a resolution. The original text never arrived. Is it possible to move in between healing and not? To be less binary, to dwell on the liminal spaces in between? Is that even allowed? Nathanaël. talks about the rejection of her work by various publishers who wanted it to be more absolute, more binary.
“To write through an uncertain body, to write memories of an/other body that has been cut o¤ from its origins and desires, demands that a writer experiment with multiple languages and syntaxes.” Doug Rice p. 88
I want to write as the little girl who was the object of abuse. To give her a life that didn’t have those experiences. Instead I have a doubling, the girl and outside the girl, looking down. The girl and the woman, who wishes she could have protected her more. Who is guilty for having not.
“An experiment,’ William H. Gass once said, ‘has to arise out of a real dissatisfaction with existing knowledge.’” Doug Rice, p. 90.
“Tell the truth, but tell it slant,” thank you, Emily.
“Akira Kurosawa says that the artist never blinks. Artistic morality is in the act of refusing to look away. ‘” p 90. I’m tired of looking away.
“Writing does not cover over the wound, or heal the wound; writing is the wound, it makes the sutures visible. The act of writing is the need, the deep desire, to penetrate a loss of memory.” p. 90 Doug Rice.
So why can’t I just write a straight-forward memoir of the facts? This happened to me, then this happened to me. He did this, he did that. I said no. Why so many variations of the same story? Fragments, repetition, circular repetitive echos, placing an imaginary character into imaginary settings and scenarios?
In his essay Jeff Derksen talks about the role of place in narrative. In Sessions I have referred to the suburbs. I have characterized the suburbs of the work as blank, bland, anesthetized. I have created imaginary liminal space with mountains, seas, birds, berries, lilies, Valkyries, knights, a kind of dream scape, and I have created a Dream House for shelter, with hothouse flowers.
Why not name the specific places: Mississauga, Etobicoke, Gloucester (suburbs), Centretown (Dream House)? Does not naming make the work more general and therefore more universal or applicable to others? Or does it stereotype unfairly the suburbs. A poet friend once told me it was too easy to write negative portraits of the burbs and maybe he is right. I see the politics of suburban life as being primarily white, middle to upper class, car-centric and home-owner centric. I challenge the belief that nothing bad ever happens in the suburbs. This is through much of my writing. Downtown represents shelter because I had my own place and I could lock it and let no one in. It represented safety and control.
Corey Frost talks about the complication of performance and experimental narrative. Such narratives mess with sequences of time and time is an anchor for both written and performed work.
When I read Sessions at the New Stalgica Reading Series at Café Nostalgica, as a twenty-minute-long poem, a young man came up to me to tell me that during my reading he had started writing. He said this as a compliment. He found the rhythms and sound of my words to be mesmerizing and it inspired him to write. I liked what he said. Part of what I tried to do with this work and with others is get away from surface meaning in order to access the depths of the psyche, the subconscious, archetypes, dreams, symbols, our old cave dwelling brains, limbic systems, the body. Will adding a narrative aspect detract from this?
“When I think about stories and how I write them, when I try to figure out how to tell a story or construct a novel, I wallow for a while in a kind of dumb despair.” Lynne Tillman, p. 139
Perhaps Sessions is a journey, an odyssey. Mary Zimmerman adapted and rewrote the Odyssey with a woman protagonist.
https://lithub.com/10-brilliant-retellings-of-classical-myths-by-female-writers/
A woman in a long marriage falls in unrequited love with another woman. She feels passion and wakes up after a long time of being numb and asleep. She sleeps around to find comfort and solace. She keeps it secret from her husband, but he figures it out easily. They go to couples’ therapy where she reveals her childhood abuse by her father. The husband is upset that she never disclosed this and that she’s been fucking others. The therapist explains to her that she is a survivor. She realizes she has to change her life. She leaves her husband and embarks on a journey through the cold where she is tested by the elements and sent messages of comfort and future safety by the Dream House.
This is where the so-called plot falls apart.
“ […] I have trouble determining plots. To me there are many, many reasons why things happen or don’t, and I’m concerned about overemphasizing one or two. Also, plot seems a way of setting limits – to control the meaning of a story. It can set out a
‘because’ and a ‘therefore.’ That can be a trick, too, a writer’s ruse, and therefore not a therefore at all.” Lynne Tillman, p. 146
Eileen Myles writes about the poet’s novel. P. 149. Perhaps Sessions is that, a poet’s novel. She suggests that the form of the book is as accidental as life. p. 149. My starting out method of writing the poem in 2008, coming up with a list of words that I associate with winter and white…it seems so arbitrary to me now.
“I mean, a poem is an extravagant grandiose and trembling form, for better or worse always alive, I think, and I’ve brought those weaknesses and virtues into novel writing and I’m dying to do it again.” Eileen Myles, p. 149
The sections of Sessions could easily be shuffled around. I don’t feel that there is a particular order to them. A novel is supposed to be read in a particular order, enforced by the author. Myles talks about Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch which had a chart at the beginning to suggest an alternate reading. I think of Anne Carson’s Float, a collection of individual chapbooks placed in a plexiglass case. I remember letting them tumble out and reading them in the order of the tumble.
“I just literally go into a room (one labelled ‘My Father’s Alcoholism’) and begin inventorying the memories, the substance of the memory, the materiality of it. The fur of childhood, not the feelings. When I was done with one I would wait and let another one grow. It really is like walking in the rain. Can that generate a narrative, or a narrative feel?” Eileen Myles, p. 150
I think I made an inventory of words that made me feel safe. I let myself think of stories and worlds where I could escape into as a child. At the same time, my father was a storyteller. He used stories and poems and songs to seduce me into compliance. So it’s contrary and paradoxical. My imagination was how I coped and escaped from anxieties of my childhood. My father’s constant layoffs and dismissals, my mother’s over work, our frequent moves from nice to not so nice areas and abodes. His hands on me, the sexual inuendo of his recitation of poems and singing of songs, and then once his mouth on mine, as a form of punishment when I was caught shoplifting.
“My dirty secret has always been that it’s of course about me. But I have been
educated to believe I’m no one so there’s a di¤erent self operating and I’m desperate to unburden my self of my self so I’m coming from nowhere and returning.” Eileen Myles, p. 151
“Performance, and I include readings in that, makes the body be the container for the work. It is when you write the words, of course. The body always seems like the shame.” Eileen Myles, p. 151
The thought that is unspeakable is that my father taught me desire, he taught me to yearn, to be sexual. This is a horrible thought, but desire is not horrible. How to reconcile and cope with the ugly and beauty in those ideas. To desire is to be human and alive. To be desired by one’s father is grotesque and wrong. Is it wrong to be desired? See what I wrote there? Where did I assign the blame?
I’m beginning to realize that Sessions is part of a larger work I need to write about sex, power exchange, my need for humiliation and degradation, my submissive nature, my shame about the feelings my father taught me to have for him. I don’t feel I’m ready to write this and I’m not sure it would be a work that any publisher would be willing to consider. There was nothing consensual about how my father messed up my mind. And now that I understand I’m a feminist, how does power exchange with men fit into that understanding? I don’t know. As usual, I learn by writing.
In his essay “on character,” heriberto yépez writes “whose character? always some | body else. character is always ‘us’ – in a way it’s never just ‘us.’ character can be identified (partially) with the writer. each character has some characteristics (secret or announced) that the writer has – i.e., characteristics s|he supposes are hers or his. but are not. characters are part of the writer’s life, but are never him or her, nor any person in particular; they cannot be separated, nor are they fantasy. characters are the author’s psychical family, society’s trail of doppelgängers in its course through time. [...] who’s thecharacter? no one, but many. anyone’s double. including, of course, the other side, the so-called readers, somebody else too (many). characters
operate in the field of indeterminacy, of multiplicity. (i hate names. names are in favour of being-just-one.) writing a character (packages) we do not respond to the question who am i? but to this the interrogation who else am i? a question that cannot be responded to. a character, a failed attempt to know ourselves.”
The character is both the reader and the writer and others too. How does this knowledge affect how I feel about my main character and how the MC is divided? It makes sense to me. I don’t know how to incorporate the reader as character without interrupting the flow of the work. and the flow is important. it is dream state, a dream landscape.
heriberto yépez also writes that characters are like bubble gum, they are plastic, they change. “when i write a character it must feel to me as if composed of bubble gum. a character is not a stable thing. a plasma. characters should always melt.” p. 160.
How has my character(s) changed from start to finish? I think being able to leave a perceived stability and go on a journey toward the unknown is evidence of change.
“a character is not getting away from us, nor going (more) inside. none of us can be written. in order for ‘us’ to be written (down) (=subjected) (controlled), in order for any of ‘us’ to become text / even just one /, (we) need the presence of the others, their coexistence, due to the ghostly fact that there’s no single one. no one (none) can be written. always some of us left behind. “ p. 164
“the storyteller creates, ‘produces.’ that’s what s|he is supposed to do. s|he follows maker (god/producer). this is very obvious. but s|he can follow another path: disappearance. instead of making something appear from nothingness (sic), s|he can make everything disappear into nothingness. (one is as impossible as the other. so, why not?) the storyteller could play the role of anti-god, a not-producer. sabotage. a
consumer of everything. let the universe grow and expand, produce; let the storyteller decrease the world. writing pursuing the achievement of nothing, to stop working as soon as it begins.” p. 162
I provided a resolution at the end of the work. I have mixed feelings about doing so. I didn’t create a happy ending, just happy for now. Not happy for now, but safe for now. I needed the little girl to have that safety. I need all little girls to be safe.
Camille Roy writes “I believe it is possible to have one identity in your thumb and another in your neck. I think identities can travel between persons who have an unusual mutual sympathy. Let’s not even mention multiple personality.” p. 174
In talking about Pamela Lu’s writing in very long sentences, Taylor Brady writes
“This work exploits the capacity of English syntax to become lost or confused after a certain quantitative length is reached. Lack of declension allows sentences of an arbitrarily long extension to ‘forget themselves,’ so that even in a sentence where later parsing reveals a normative construction, the reader experiences modifiers sliding away from nouns and verbs, multiply embedded subordinate clauses breaking their subordination to the main clause, etc. The total effect is one of forward motion that continually falls back upon itself, maximal fullness of syntactical elaboration becoming an odd kind of lack.” p. 191
I’ve been thinking of my use of the first iteration of Sessions as my source text to generate seed texts and how this repetition helped to create a dreamscape that is necessary to the work. I have a fantasy that I will go through all the sentences of the draft to analyze them, their function, how they are balanced. The accumulatory nature of them. But I don’t.
In her essay, Dodie Bellamy talks about syncope, “Syncope is a temporary absence of self or suspension of movement, a hesitation or dissonance.” p. 229 I think of my little girl voiceless in Sessions, her distance from her lived experience, her trauma. How she watches from above, becomes falcon, angel, Valkyrie, ghost, lily. They are all her.
Maybe the little girl will have agency. I would write her whole life over again. The rebellious child who runs away early, learns to survive. She is able to kill, kill her father by divesting herself of love, the love that was used as a way to make her comply, to confuse her, to cause her silence.
What is the place of the narrator? The author? I am no innocent bystander.
kari edwards writes of a narrative of resistance. Yes, and therefore a narrative of resilience.
Aja Couchois Duncan – “As scribes we document our world. But ‘the surfaces are complex, looping.’”
By turning the poem into a story perhaps I give myself permission to resist the stories my father told me, the family story in which he was the protagonist, forever the injured party, and his actions were caused by losing his job again and again. His alcoholism, the way he caused me to always be on guard, to have no space where I felt safe. To feel guilty for not loving him in the way that he cried for when he was drunk and reeking of rye in front of my bedroom door in his white vest and underwear. Perhaps I rewrote the story, and in this story the little girl escapes and finds safety.
EXCERPT FROM THE ORIGINAL POEM
the nothing landscape
has lost its everything
composed as frost mirage
ice cracked in visible
compliance the struggle
of texture over glide
swirl or less
the missing and the wanting
mouth a lacuna
searches for cold
numb thicked tectonic
throat song for the viscous
EXCERPT FROM THE NARRATIVE ADAPTATION
A. wanders through the nothing landscape. In search of my lost everything she finds comfort in the frost mirage, the visible ice cracks.
Too often I have chosen compliance, struggled against texture over glide. Her mouth, a lacuna, seeks cold. I am trying to overcome being numb, a paradox, perhaps. In the distance she hears a tectonic throat song. It is viscous.
Amanda is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council Recommender Grant for Writers Program for funding this work in 2020, and to Coach House Books for recommending the project, and also to Coach House for Biting the Error, a foundational book that needed to be published.
Amanda is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the fallen angel of AngelHousePress. She is the recipient of the 2017 Tree Reading Series Chapbook Award for Electric Garden. She was inducted into the VERSeOttawa Hall of Honour in 2014. Two of her manuscripts were shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Innovative Poetry Award. Further information is available at AmandaEarl.com. Connect with Amanda on Twitter @KikiFolle.