on form (ii)

WHITE SPACE

White space means I miss you a lot, all the time. That I’m holding a place for you, potentially. And here comes the future. But not yet

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While ordinary prose pushes space to the margins of the page and the small rivers that trickle between words, a poem can appear as if laid on a snowfield or blotter

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The largest expanse of white space I have experienced was the Ross Ice Shelf. Any marks humans made on it felt insignificant. Yet the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which the ice shelf borders, is shrinking

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When white space is used deliberately, it may seem as if a desire to trouble hierachies is in play. To bring into the foreground what is literally marginal – text’s overlooked scaffolding – is to draw attention to the conventional privileging of noise over silence, certainty over indeterminacy, speaking over listening, productivity over doing nothing

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For some poets spacing is about music and sound. Mallarmé, for instance, whose late poem Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the dice will never abolish chance) may have been the first to conceive of the page as a visual field. With its cascading sentence fragments, contrasting font sizes and irregular scatterings of words (some cluster in constellations while others appear to have been swept to the edge of the page), the poem prompted a fellow poet to declare that Mallarmé had made space speak for the first time. The author himself, in his 1897 preface to the poem, compared it to a musical ‘score’, with the irregular spacing separating its beats as ‘a surrounding silence’. He also drew attention to its materiality: ‘The Paper intervenes each time as an image, of itself’

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According to the internet, the first edition of Mallarmé’s poem (1,000 copies) included 10 printed on Montval paper, and 90 on Vélin d’Arches paper. The remaining 900 were on ‘ordinary paper’

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When used deliberately white space might signal that a text is less a completed work than an invitation to construct one. Especially when accompanied by formal practices such as fragmentation, parataxis or erasure that generate effects of incompleteness and discontinuity. Requiring readers to step over the gaps or to fill them, to connect the scattered shards and decipher their stories

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Like bread, the page has become whiter as a result of industrial technology, including the use of bleaches and optical brighteners. The paper-making equivalent of the Chorleywood Bread process (enabling white, fluffy bread to be produced rapidly and at industrial scale) is the Fourdrinier machine, which produces a continuous roll of paper at speeds of up to 100kmh. A whiter, brighter page is considered to enhance readability through its contrast with the darkness of type. Although it’s tempting to see it as an example of the capitalist unconscious at work, manufacturing objects that reflect the cultural value accrued by whiteness

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It’s not so much that I want to overturn a hierachy as that I wish things could be more balanced. Or less determined. White space as potentiality, the surface on which games of chance are played. An unknowability that stands in opposition to algorithms and predictive analytics whose aim is to ensure that each throw of the dice generates profit, or prevents its dissemination

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A happy memory my mother had of her childhood: being allowed to write on the walls of her bedroom because it was about to be re-papered.

alison glenny

o

In the winter of 2022, the mother was supposed to be at work on a book of essays called Hiding Places, which was under a provisional contract. The title of the book comes from a suspicion she has that there is never nothing beneath something that is covered. She wants to write about what we hide and why we hide it, and what happens to the stuff we hide. She wants it to be performative, a performance of hiding. She wonders how she can become the unreliable narrator in the telling of her own story, to make it the reader’s job to unpack the truth of what she’s saying. Or not saying. It’s not what she says but how she says it that reveals what’s hidden beneath.

The mother thinks about the possibility of writing in the present tense. In I Love Dick, Chris Kraus reflects on writing in the first person, which is kind of interesting. But for the mother, the present tense feels like the thing, really. How to keep the thoughts alive long enough that they will be written. When thinking is written, she thinks, remembering when she was first Gertrude Steined. She may be continuously present.

The mother wonders how writing can be a way of working through thinking through writing through reading. To write as if reading. To read as if writing. How reading is written. How Stein is reading. How reading is Stein is thinking is a rose.

[from a forthcoming book]

lynley edmeades

o

Form is something I feel a little uncomfortable writing about, because I am a poet (and, to be honest, a reader) who has an antipathy to form – by which I mean pre-existing forms, rhythms, rhyme schemes and structures in poetry – and therefore feel unknowledgeable about it. I think my antipathy is partly due to my general undisciplined character – I can’t help but rebel against frameworks, schedules, neatness, budgets – but also because (probably due to becoming conscious just as form and flares were going out of fashion) I still view things like rhythm and rhyme schemes (and flares) as old-fashioned and kind of cringe. This is narrow of me, and I do apologise, but these are my feelings even though they are wrong.

However, form is in the eye of the beholder, and every poem needs some kind of container, or becomes some kind of shape. When I’m writing a poem I never know quite how to write this poem, and don’t usually start out with an expectation of its shape or form. Instead I try to listen to it, watch it, and see what it needs, what shape it wants to be. For example, I look for patterns and see how I can use them – follow them or perhaps cut across them.

In the last few years I’ve been avoiding line breaks – I’m finding freedom in the prose poem. Even without rhythms or rhyme schemes to contend with, I had been feeling line breaks were making my phrasing stilted, requiring a contortion I no longer wanted to do. Now I’m more interested in different ways of fragmenting the poem, using unconventional punctuation, breaking up sections, using gaps of narrative or sense, for example.

When I started writing a deconstructed biography about George Eliot (‘George Eliot: a life’), the form came to me quite quickly. I wanted to write about the different topics you would normally find in a biography, but each in their own section. And because I was eschewing the normal organising principle of chronology, I decided on the structure of a technical report with numbered paragraphs – which arguably counts as a form.

For me sometimes the form I want – or perhaps ‘layout’ is a more accurate description – doesn’t reveal itself to me until quite late in the poem’s creation. For example, I had already written pages and pages of ‘How to live’, but I still didn’t know quite what it was. When I decided the way to present it was as a broken ribbon of text, emphasising the fragmentation and connection that was already going on, this breakthrough helped me understand what the tone I wanted was, and be able to rework the poem to fit that. Similarly, I had a lot of text already for ‘Notes on the unsilent woman’ – I had been working on it for more than a year, but it wasn’t yet working. And then, in a flash I realised it wanted (I wanted it) to be broken into 58 fragments (inspired by Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Notes on Camp’), and everything else fell into place.

Have I addressed the topic? I’m not sure. Perhaps I haven’t found the right form yet?

helen rickerby

o

Poetry’s form’s desire’s

Poetry’s forms roar sound shush begin again
 
Twisting concept through the marrow of listening
Poetry forms artifice flowers growing to be the no-exist there plant
 
Poetry’s forms are bridges opening and closing the water of the reaching writer
Every time the water and the bridge and the words’ tongues reach
 
Poetry’s forms express the permissions of the languages they’re held in
Each form’s a translation map from the multi-forms of that poem’s languages
 
Poetry forms think-feeling to webby strands
Pert, echo-locative, cluster, commune, ebb tide pouring out what concerning stuff
 
Poetry’s forms seep, swear, desiccate, replenish
 
A poem’s form’s embryonic cleaving internal
 
Poetry’s forms audition themselves, cast every kind, keep the metal pouring
 
Poetry’s form’s malleable like reading it different each read
Screen and page make sounds every form
 
Poetry’s form’s stick to its surfaces – sticky kitchen bench, sticky paperette, sticky phoneface, sticky ink sliding on surfaces
 
Poetry as form rises out of the eyes nose mouth ears fingers electricity interface scratchy paper sound of keystrokes
 
Poetry like anything is form: everything about it can be traced, present and absent, with the compass of the context of readers who come to put the poem in mind
 
Poetry is form given to the writer with language in the interactive techne of the making of the poem in that occurrence
 
Poetry as form conjures the threadplay between reader body and word bodies
 
Poetry’s form tethers release to the potential of its actualization
 
Poetry’s form’s malleable, shifted into different watery shapes with different appearances (publications, versions, space, voice)
This malleability is a constitutive omnipresent tremor in poetry’s form
 
Poetry’s form is hungry for repetition and for difference
Flowers plunk out of the plant to be flowers and to be the plant, repeating difference
 
Poetry’s form trembles in relation to its settlement in some hard shape
Not unwilling, knowing the little room’s the appear provision
 
Poetry’s forms giggle with prediction’s predilections
 
Poetry’s forms have the right to be everything they are and more
 
Mouth makes wet breath emit as poem form, poem poem poem pops out the interbody shaking its forms beside the poem’s
 
Spiral to every meet
 
Poetry’s form breathes air in the molecules of its inherence
 
Poetry’s forms tumble, rise, emerge, out of the

lisa samuels

o

Poetry has no purpose
— robert creeley

Life’s deepest urge is to be free of
form. And what is form? Call it an
inclination to give definition to an urge
that lacks shape.

Form is beauty, beauty form.

Or: poetry is disinterest couched in gratification.

The present (moment) appears. Relinquishing requires it to do that. There’s no meaning but one one expresses.

How define the agency of choice-making?

Sure, a word (or poem) is ascribed meaning, two, a phalanx of paired shoes in a row with their laces neatly tied together. I’m drawn to complexity, despite the wearing of close-fitted shoes and their peregrinations, tripping along. Preparedness concerns an art in the form of freefall.

breath
enters and leaves
an open door

Rather than pools in the environment, or contemporary living, poetry rises like a bubble appearing & moving upward towards the pool’s surface, where it pops, taking the pool with it:

I am afraid of the taihia the poolside
attendant vigorously twirls. Their shadow combines & falls
onto the bottom of the pool & realizing this
my fear settles there as well.

Don Hoffman: the (entropic) arrow of time is not an insight into the nature of reality. It is entirely an artifact of the loss of information in our projection. T in equations does not represent an actual now.

Poetry approaches the asymptote of
this actual now. It is as meaningful
as it is not: that’s the trick.

I watch myself in the sky. So many
obstructions, so much obfuscation. So much joy!

Your sentence patterns in my ears along with the sound that expands into the space allowed for it:

Poetic inspiration is a rocket
commanding the sky
it momentarily skids through.

Language is a mechanism for
others—not
oneself. One does not
experience oneself there. Michael Levin terms
this arrangement
a bowtie
connecting salience
with fidelity to fact.

I the apparatus is simulacrum, a function,
a mode of existence, an image, a concept,
a blood flow.

If I am the person to be characterised in this manner, I am decidedly out-of-doors.

Thank you for the effort you’ve put in, although I won’t take you up on your offer for now. I do want a better relationship, but what’s put forward here amounts to a charge sheet that finds me already 100% guilty on all counts.

Play is reality in reverse.

Everything’s nothing misreading itself.

The word defines defies everything (in the world).

‘Genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix genres’ (Carla Harrington, Vice). ‘We no longer have to lull ourselves expecting the advent of some one artist who will satisfy all our aesthetic needs’, John Cage, A Year from Monday).

When something is
formed there is
form. Ask God. Not
the form from which it
arose. When something
is formed there
is no form that
formed it.

Occupying a position one sees perfectly well what is to be seen from there.

Individual is not contextual in context.

What is (or makes) legitimacy a feeling? A legitimate feeling?

A thought (art) is not an explanation. Art proves it cannot be killed (or substituted for).

Possibility is not a fixed endeavour.

Not all eyes are fixed on the new.

Possibility is endless.

And so how do you shape yourself? That is poetry. Without bottom, top, mid-point. It was nothing.[1]

Loss of shape is loss of poetry.

john geraets

[1] ‘Poems don’t purify anyone’. ‘Like every author, when I come to the end of a piece of writing, it is quite clear to me that I will never write again. The upper air, the middle air, the lower air, is blank’ (LECTURE ON THE HISTORY OF SKYWRITING), Anne Carson, Wrong Norma.

o

write an abstract poem write an alba
write an anacreontic write an aubade
write a ballad a ballade and perhaps
blank verse write a calligramme do a
canto or a choriamb write a cinquain
write a couplet or a dithyramb write
some doggerel write an eclogue write
an elegy with an envoy or an epigram
write an epistle write an epitaph or
pen an epithalamion or try your hand
at free verse trot out gnomic verses
practise haiku lay out a lay write a
limerick let lyric have its way with
you but compose an ode cut a pantoum
write in pastoral in a quatrain make
a rondeau or a rondel write a sonnet
revel in a sestina in a tercet trial
a threnody then concoct a villanelle

this away from that these from those
those come forth from here and these
among the rest that goes toward this
they are together with them and them
with those this came after that & it
comes beneath these that passed thru
there these are next to those and is
additional to this and them abutting
this & those are up against that and
one goes from the side of another or
to another these are alongside these
that is past this and this is beyond
them which in turn are near those as
these are far away from these and is
there by the aid of this or those or
these all here in respect of all and
even this may touch or not the far &
near as prepositions go beside which

quadrate wager effulgent runnel thaw
yeast untrammeled indigo opaque pike
acoustic septuagenary diadem fervent
glossary habergeon jeopardy keelhaul
lassitude zenith xanthin coruscation
vivacity bauble nebula matrix quarry
weave enallage reckon threnody yield
umbel irradiate oasis pensive attest
scrannel doubt fracture glyph heresy
juxtaposition kiln littoral zoetrope
xenial cursive vocable burden neuter
molecular querulous waste enterprise
roulette trace yearn uncial identity
openness plurisy adamantine sanguine
deft fetter gimblet hinge jet kernel
legerdemain zephyr xylograph cranium
versification bagatelles nothingness
miscellany question wit echo thought

alan loney

note

dear John – here are three pages from a work titled conStellations – all composed directly on the typewriter which need, if at all, to be reproduced as is to preserve their form, written a few years ago – the third one is a word beginning with each of the letters on the keyboard – from QWERTY onwards – for me, when I talk of form, must also talk about structure, shaping, craft, making things – form is concrete, worldly, physical on the page – where one word goes, where the next word goes – can I do it well or badly – for these poems, it was the typewriter itself that helped shape the poems, how each letter takes up the same lateral space, which is decidedly not how typefaces work – here, they are in the computer’s Courier face, as close to the typewriter as one can get – but craft, craft craft, craft, etc etc etc  – it was the type designer Theodore Low de Vinne (1828-1914) who said ‘No art without craft’, and that has long been a touchstone for me – ‘form is never more than an extension of content’ (Creeley / Olson), yes, but it also a creator of content – form makes meaning / meaning makes form – which also tells me that form has been a conversation between poets for a very long time, and I myself cannot talk of form without that polylogue being front of mind – always, one’s small & insignificant place in the total conversation of poetry, across the globe & thruout history – the conversation for instance from Keats, who worked from dissatisfaction with the sonnet forms of the day (Petrarch’s and Shakespeare’s) to the development of the form that became that of his great Odes – another touchstone is Albrecht Durer’s ‘on the just shaping of letters’ which I take across to ‘on the just shaping of the poem’ – it is not ‘to cheat’ to write a sonnet, it is to accept the requirement & challenge of technique & craft in making poems – and to respect one’s predecessors, who didn’t have the options available to them that we do – in conStellations, I wanted to see what happens when one creates a form [36 characters per line, 18 lines per page, no hyphens at line endings] and pours any old vino collapso into it – (Beatrice Warde’s essay ‘The Crystal Goblet’ is relevant here