i will forget what is written there

this was for a writing assignment in a class. thought i’d store it here.

look here! the moon arcs away, / away into some future form, / sheets of world / scatter beneath her. / i will forget what is written there / what i will never know / what is not here / not here yet.

The first of my writings that I can refer to were stories created on my heavy old typewriter, on varying shades of construction paper, starting at the age of four. They stretched on and on, sentences conjoined as far as the eye could see by the word ‘and.’ Accompanying these stories, in books that my father helped create, were my drawings. Here was the beginning of my desire to write as an exchange (a story told, a story heard) and my inseparable relationship between visual imagery and the written word.

I have been writing as a serious compulsion for many years. Recently, I have been going back through my piles and piles of old journals, word documents, crumpled notebook papers, small scraps of papers, and soiled napkins. I have been reading my own work and the work of other writing friends. This has been an unexpected archaeological investigation, a haphazard genealogy, without all the scientific method.

I write intuitively. Much of what I start with never came out of an intention and is usually incomprehensible to me. In my editing, re-reading, and sharing, I begin to make some kind of (non)sense out of what I have written. I am finding many new things as I re-read my old work and the works of those close to me. I see where we were working off of one another, the subtle underlying dialogues we were all having, the meaning between us that I had not yet realized was there. Lately, I have been writing with a friend, exchanging poems back and forth. It has been amazing, things written translated in someone else’s voice, veering off into other meanings. To find some semblance of understanding that doesn’t lock anything down and confine it. I find new things in my writings, about myself, about this other person, about experience, emotion, the world in these exchanges.

The meaning is precarious- as I write and as we read. I was just reading an essay for David’s class, Trauma and Public Memory, by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. Speaking about the power of images versus text in the media, they suggest that text “adheres to the norms of discursive rationality,” and has an inability to express the layers of a traumatic break or rupture. It is here where poetry enters in very interesting ways and relates very much to the voice(s) of visual images. A poem uses syntax and words in unusual, broken, obstinate, disruptive ways, to write a new landscape, emotion, a series of four lines that bursts into multiple worlds and experiences all layering upon one another. Here I can find things that cannot exist neatly in the realm of rationality.

I did not consciously choose poetry though it has been a good relationship. I do not desire a great precision in detail. In fact, I feel quite suffocated when I read anything where the author is intent on a full description of a scene, a character, an action. To my mind, it is not only impossible, but takes away from my imaginings. I like a loose weave- in reading and writing- one that references perhaps Joan Didion’s image that shimmers around the edges but that leaves the reader to the forever unfolding task of deciphering.

My poetic writing, my favorite writing, is very visual and very loose.

There are lands spreading out in the distance of these words, only to be known in a fleeting moment, by one person, forever-changing. I will forget what is written there. I will remember something else.

~ by wehavetobehavetobeerrant on February 3, 2008.