a series of fragments & notes about chance, fate, context & intention by Dara Wier
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the cure for loneliness is solitude —Marianne Moore
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books and film regarding all of the complexities of art forgery (here and now, back then, before it was called that, why now, fascinating.......) I guess some of a background re such could be: well then, art as reality, art is reality, art imitates reality, art adds to reality, art suffers reality, art belies reality, art ignores reality, art considers reality, art eats reality, art suffers reality, art implies reality, art succumbs to reality, art compounds reality, art visits reality, art evaluates reality, art improves reality, art recycles reality, art does no harm to reality, art surprises reality, art loves reality, art charms reality, art disconcerts reality, art tricks reality, art expands reality, art comforts reality, art extends reality, art anesthetizes reality, art destroys reality, art does not do that, and so on while switching that up some might help a little: reality is art, reality imitates art, reality adds to art, reality suffers art, reality implies art, reality succumbs to art, reality compounds art, reality visits art, reality evaluates art, reality improves art, reality recycles art, reality does no harm to art, reality surprises art, reality loves art, reality charms art, reality disconcerts art, reality tricks art, reality expands art, reality comforts art, reality extends art, reality anesthetizes art, reality destroys art, which neither does that do
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Here're a couple of sentences from a novel I just finished, though these aren't from near its end:
He didn't feel connected by a traceable series of linked events to a source that had purposefully conveyed him, from elsewhere, into this world. He felt like a digression that had forgotten from what it digressed and was continuing ahead............... (from Tao Lin's TAIPEI)
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does an end (not a conclusion, not necessarily a final note, not a door or window closing, not necessarily a closing, more often an exit, a fire exit, a routine exit, an opening, an abrupt shift, a station, a stop, a fare-the-well, an exhaustion, an extremity, a barely perceptible adjustment, a part on the opposite side of a beginning, a pause, an arbitrary stasis, an irreversible action) —does one need to be a few notches higher, a little torqued, twisted more than previous lines or very terrifyingly quiet quiet almost inaudible, close to invisible, almost
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I think it's passing strange when someone says or writes that epiphanies are passe, how can this be possible—
a realization as interior condensation, that ancient action sometimes called dew on the soul. (see Emily Dickinson's "debauche of dew" in a poem sometimes known as #214))
I do like to think about resisting epiphany. Of refusing to feel one's brain's impulses shattered into something one hadn't thought before. That seems to take some effort. Of some kind.
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Here is the somewhat surprising end of Wallace Stevens' HIBISCUS ON THE SLEEPING SHORES: ..........................................................red as red As the flag above the old cafe--- And roamed there all the stupid afternoon
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why comparative ways can predetermine how one will by necessity demean in order to justify fault-finding in order to prop up one's preferences, this requires a touching sequence of hesitations and qualifications and mis-steps something as sorry as a friend's choosing to withhold what used to be freely given sympathy when one's need for sympathy is huge
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how it is unusual to imagine no memory concerning odd bits such as "a grisly experiment in which heads of guillotined criminals were allegedly questioned for several minutes, responding to questions by blinking their eyelids" which I'd recalled knowing as a girl, wondering never once from where I'd pulled this bit of story......finding it again quoted in a review of a book about Samuel Beckett by John Calder (who published Beckett, Burroughs, Nabokov, Genet, others), and only then, finding it again, do I wonder where I ran into the first time------this is a kind of reading deja vu
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Transcription: verbatim copying------------ (as I guess sometimes happened in any so-called sacred scriptorium) as I had to do sometimes all the day long, depending on which sister's lot it was to see to our industrious never-ending edification favorite transcription sessions, overseen not by an official sister but by Miss Burris the Magnificent; Miss Burris insisted we use ink pens, that we make not one error, that we write for hours on end. I think I know just a few phrases of some of our Constitutional Amendments because I've copied them several times over. Our ink pens could not be filled with ink cartridges; they had to be filled at the ink well, I love the little contraptions that worked to suction up ink into our pretty little pens. I liked that we had blotting paper. I liked how old fashioned this made me feel. I think of transcription as a very old-fashioned method of killing time. And not necessarily an awful one, depending on what's being copies and for what purposes.
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I felt fortuitously fortunate to have stumbled upon reading Tao Lin's TAIPEI and Fyodor Dostoevsky's NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND back to back.
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"giving the thing a name that belongs to something else" Aristotle in 1475b
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I wondered about what can go on in a poem that's not so likely to go on elsewhere. I wondered if in a poem there is something happening that can't be happening otherwise or elsewhere. My sense of this is that there must be. There must be something that happens inside a poem that doesn't happen elsewhere.
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She asked me, to what do you attribute your particular kind of imagination? Unequivocally to endless hours spent sitting watching a river pass by
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♠
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Dara Wier is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Selected Poems, Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, and You Good Thing (now available from Wave Books). She teaches in the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets and Writers. Her awards include the Poetry Center and Archives Book of the Year Award, a Pushcart Prize, the American Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She edits Factory Hollow Press. Visit her author page at Wave Books or read an interview.