Brade Lands began as an experiment at a timestamped
writing practice, inspired by Lyn Hejinian’s The Cell. The form gave me
license to write lines that were more notational and impressionistic than I was
accustomed to, and that resisted (for a time, at least) the intensive revision
that typically characterized my writing process. As the project progressed, its
preoccupations began to take shape: the exterior manifestations of emotional
life, and the abrasive force that accompanies any thing (a feeling, a thought,
a self) brushing against its boundaries. As I wrote, the style evolved, bearing
the imprint of what I was reading at the time; Lyn Hejinian’s My Life
and My Life in the Nineties, Jane Gregory’s YEAH NO, and the
short stories of Clarice Lispector all left their impressions. The original
composition period lasted around a year, from May 2018-2019 – an italicized
heading refers to the date a page was originally drafted.
Since then, the sections have been refined, tweaked, massaged, deagitated, reagitated, and just generally subjected to the whims of my intuition, which change as I change. (For me, I think the revision of a poem stops only once I've changed so much that I no longer have access to the person I was when I wrote it. The amount of time this takes varies wildly.) Yet it was always important to maintain the integrity of the original composition: lines could not move between dated entries, and the entries remained in the order I wrote them. Even more essential was maintaining the poems' notational sensibility, the feeling of jotted-down units of language which didn't follow syntactically or logically but nevertheless pushed and pulled at the lines around them -- these little particles exciting each other with their own charge. At a certain point, my lines began to grow longer, and a self-consciously confessional voice asserted itself. The question, then, was how this emergent "I" would refract the language that swirled around it, the shorter lines which, though composed according to sound and texture, came from the same place -- in Alice Notley's words, “the hole from which images come.”
Peter Myers is the author of the chapbooks Brade Lands (above/ground press) and The Hangnail (Belladonna*). His reviews and essays have been featured in Chicago Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Annulet, and elsewhere.
