What is conceptual poetry?
The best definition I've heard is simply this: conceptualism treats language as an object, not simply a collection of signs denoting other objects. In other words, a traditional reading would view "A" as an indefinite article, indicating a singular noun will soon follow. But conceptualism may view "A" as a material object, a thing rather than symbol. "A" is as much a teepee with a crossbeam as it is a signifier.
That's not the entire definition of conceptualism, but this idea of the "physicality" of letters and language is what fascinates me.
Back to that thought about Vanessa Place. At Naropa, she read a piece entitled "you." It goes like this:
you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you
I may have miscounted the number of you's, and there may or may not be punctuation in there, but that's the piece as I remember it from three years ago. Ms. Place read the piece in a slow, monotonous way that sort of dulled the word over the course of the reading. At first, the word "you" performed its duty as a personal pronoun--interrogative, perhaps, or accusatory--but the repetition blunted the word's significance until by the end it was just a repetitive sound. Meaningless.
Someone on Twitter accused Vanessa Place of killing poetry. My own take is this: she is reminding us of language's artificiality, its constructed-ness.
I'm interested in prose writing that uses language as more than simply a tool of conveyance. I'm interested in language that also functions as an object (take a letterpress printing class; you'll see what I mean). That's why some of my writing over the last few years has explored language as a set of graphic objects--things that can be moved, manipulated, juxtaposed, and generally arranged in ways we associate with visual art. The Backroom Diaspora, for instance, includes numerous font types, overlapping letters, paragraphs at 90 degree angles to other paragraphs, pictures, and color gradations creating the effect of appearing and vanishing language. Not only was the book a lot of fun to write/assemble, it relied on these visual considerations. It wouldn't work any other way.
More recently, I published a piece called Honest Expression for a Tranquil Now! on Scribd. (You can read/download it here.) Once again, the piece features overlapping words/narratives and other graphic elements. I published it on Scribd because I couldn't get it published in any lit mags.
There are plenty of reasons a piece may be rejected by a lit journal. Maybe it doesn't meet the needs or aesthetics of the editors, maybe the journal doesn't have the resources to format and print such an unusual piece, or maybe the piece just sucks. (It could be the last one; I think the story's pretty good, but I'm not a reliable judge of my own writing.)
Another possible explanation for the piece's rejection may be that some writers/editors are anti-weird formatting. One author I respect blogged that good writing doesn't need graphic/formal variations. The text should be strong enough to stand on its own.
I disagree with that idea, and if you read either of the two pieces I mention, you'll see why. Certain things become possible when an author experiments with text-placement, font selections, colors and shading and overlapping and other strategies. This is not to say all authors should write and format works like Mark Danielewski does. There's no substitute for good storytelling, and if an author uses fancy graphic elements to spruce up a mediocre piece, the reader will know.
Still, I think there's a place for such visual experimentation--when appropriate to the story. If I continue to play with such formal elements, I'm pretty sure it won't "kill" storytelling. I'm pretty sure the worst that will happen is I'll see more rejection emails in my inbox, and I get those either way.
No comments:
Post a Comment