Space and Light (part 3)

In one old volume and two forthcoming (OcSerp, the Icarus project, and diluvium, respectively), I want(ed) white space. That white space is there for you, dear reader, and I recently came across someone else thinking similar thoughts about it.

In her essay "American Poetic Music at the Moment" in Coming After, Alice Notley refers to white space in poetry as a "non-narcissistic possibility." This is precisely what I was trying to achieve in OcSerp by having facing pages mirror each other, yet contain antithetical material. It sets up a spectrum, implies by its very nature something between the pages that is lost on one side or the other. The play with history, as some reviewers noted, suggests that there are poems extending out to either side as well.

In the upcoming Icarus chapbook containing a sequence by Crystal Boson and a sequence by myself, it's not just about putting two authors in one book. It's about putting together two sequences that take nearly opposite approaches to the same project, stylistically speaking. If we're lucky, readers will find space for Icarus poems of their own. That space will owe itself in part to the space created between us and the existing batch of Icarus poetry, nearly all of it a simple retread of the myth or a reaction to Breughel's painting.

In diluvium, literal space is crucial. On days when the main characters are particularly stressed, fragments and lyrics from the edges of the page creep in and obscure the reader's view of the conscious poetic utterances in the center. This opens up a space wherein the reader is forced to negotiate among sections of the page, to establish personal hierarchies of importance, not just interpret for a single answer.

Three sequences I'm researching for my dissertation take this tack in startling ways. I may include bits and pieces of what I'm thinking about them specifically in future posts. Those sequences, incidentally, are Tom Phillip's A Humument, Anne Carson's Plainwater (which I treat as an extended sequence, not just a book containing several sequences), and Ed Dorn's unfinished Languedoc Variorum: A Defense of Heresy and Heretics.