Things happen. Thinking as a physicist-by-training, I model these ‘things’ into hypotheses. We all have a tendency to string these events together. The narrative is a way of joining things into something more understandable. We connect a series of narratives together to form longer stories. Sometimes we think these are realistic.

Poetry is words placed in particular orders operating according to a set of rules. The rules can be quite complex, involving rhyme variations and structures, or use particular sequences and rhythms, have determined numbers of lines, twists and turns, drawing conclusions or otherwise.

‘A poem is a small machine made out of words’. What is the product of that machine? If it has the job of making meaning from words, then how does it function as poetry, and not prose? If it is specific type of ordered meaning, does it reflect the real world?

Some written works produce unexpectedly indefinite results. Applying fixed rules on the page does not always produce the same heard poem. Jackson Mac Low’s ‘A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore’ (among other ‘vocabulary’ pieces) has rigid rules, a finite printed sequence of words, yet produces almost infinite variations when read aloud.

Things happen. Many things simultaneously happen in the same spacetime as a single event. Other events happen in different spacetimes. They (probably) observe the same rules, springing from the same place. They can be stacked in multiple combinations to form small universes. I observe my universe. You observe yours. We assume we observe the same.

‘Bedtime Story’ is the same story, just in different timespaces. It is tempting to read it by linear translation down the column, as one narrative after another, but there is no reason why this should be so. Maybe the eye should move horizontally, across the paragraphs, noting the differences. Or possibly we should wander diagonally to combine the paragraphs or shake tetrahedral die to decide which paragraph to read. More variations can be investigated by adding extra columns, changing the pronouns or tenses, perhaps.

Things happen. Narrative is a sequencing of events, an imposition on events. We assume there is a reason for this sequencing, some ’cause and effect’. We hope we give this reason some legitimacy. But we exist in a universe where the possibilities generated by events bifurcate and spread. Possibly we exist in all these universes, or just in some combinations. We can only observe a small part of this(these) universe(universes). This is the reality of our place of being.

.’Bedtime Story’ is words placed in particular orders operating according to a set of rules, a machine for making meaning out of words. It investigates the same event in parallel timespaces. It attempts to use repetition, translation and sampling between the different views to give it some form or structure. It is my attempt to replicate ‘reality’ in some of its complexity. Does it exist as poetry, or prose? Maybe something else? Or any combination of both? Or either? And other questions…

martin porter