Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Construction/Design - Layla's Question and Jeremy's Question
LAYLA: I was very interested in the book's construction and how it blurred genres. I would call it a mix of poetry, lyric essay and collage but I think part of the spirit (the idea of a walk) of the book is to resist those firm categories and to force the reader to contend with the book on its own terms, the reader must be manipulated/changed, forced to turn the book this way and that to read the different sections, the reader is moved in a literal sense. It reminded me of some paintings I have seen where the side of the canvas is very thick and you have to walk around it and physically move yourself to see the entire painting. What is the effect of the book's construction/design on its content? // JEREMY: How does having to rotate the book to read affect the meaning or feeling of the text?
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I strongly disliked the need to rotate the book and I think it did the subject matter a disservice. The prose in this section reads as an essay and I think it would have been stronger as an essay because the subject matter is so powerful, the turning of it distracts from what’s being read. Forcing your reader to turn the book is forcing your reader to think about the book as an object, the actual page, rather than the subject at hand. When form overpowers content, the work becomes more about how a writer says something than what is actually being said. Isn’t the content strong enough to interest the reader without the sideways positioning? It irritated me because I feel myself being manipulated, and I think when a reader can feel it, it’s too much. It oversteps its bounds in telling me how to look at the subject. I can make that decision on my own. And if that is not the purpose of turning it sideways, what is?
ReplyDeleteI also have a problem with the mix of prose and poetry, since parts are clearly prose and parts are clearly meant to be poetry. I think mixing the prose and poetry together does a disservice to both. When I was reading the essay portions, already distracted by the fact that they were on their side, the bursts of poetry felt like unneeded interruption from the information I was being given. Then when I got to the poetry, I wasn’t discovering anything because I had already been given history and facts and a writing assignment and had been so instructed on what to feel, of course I felt sad because I already knew the horrible things that had happened. I knew what to expect and it felt like I wasn’t looking at art, I was looking at advertising, because this writer has an agenda and they’ve already told us what had happened and why it was bad, and know they’re going to sell it in another, more artistic way. I think this excuses weak poetic moments, not just in this work but anytime poetry is combined with prose or physical object, even music. That is not always the case, but it allows it. And it’s fine when it’s incorporated with all its other elements, I guess, because it doesn’t have to stand alone. But from a poetry perspective, I feel like that can be a problem.
Nick Flynn had said in an interview that he had originally intended his memoir The Ticking is the Bomb to be a hybrid of prose and poetry and his editor made him take the poetry out, which initially had infuriated him, but he did so and he then created a book of poetry from the poems that had been cut out, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, and he said that he was glad for it, because the prose actually stood stronger without the poems, and the poems became their own powerful thing and that it would’ve been a mistake to throw the two together. His original intention for mixing them had been to push the boundaries of form, but to do so would have distracted from the subject, raising a daughter in an error of terrorism, war, and torture, which has nothing to do with poetic and nonfiction forms.