In an hour I can add 400 or 500 words to my total word count. Thus a 5,000 word article will take somewhere between 10 and 12.5 hours to complete. Even it if takes another twelve hours to revise it into presentable style, that's still only about 24. Of course, that still doesn't account for the everyday reading and mulling over of things that makes it possible to come up with a viable concept for the article in the first place. That is unquantifiable. Should one account for dreaming hours to?
***
David Shapiro's birthday was January 2. He is the oldest 59-year-old poet, in number of years he has been writing, and writing well. The youngest 59-year-old American poet in his youthful freshness. There are poems in January that, if better known, would completely re-alter our thinking about contemporary poetry. He was "pre-post-avant,"-- to abuse a term that Jim Behrle says we should simply retire. (I agree with Him.)
***
The next article: "Episodes in the Reception of Spanish-Language Poetry in the U.S.: Parody, Pastiche, and Assimilation" It will have one major section on Kenneth Koch's "Some South American Poets." You'll have to come to Austin and hear me speak about this. I can't get an entire article out of just Koch's parodies, but I can get one section of a longer piece. I have till March to finish this one, according to my one-year plan. At least I have a title that can hold its own.
So much depends on how much I can get done before classes start. I don't have to step into the classroom until January 24.
I can only deny my inner academic so long before he starts to howl in protest and sabotage other parts of my life.
3 comentarios:
Yes, you should count the dreams.
There must be an optimal dreaming to writing ratio.
The way Hemingway said he wrote is one way to understand this. You get up. Read what you've got so far (editing lightly as you go). Pick up where you left off. Write "until you come to a place when you still have your juice and you know what will happen next". Then you stop. You spend the rest of the day doing other things. And then you get up in the morning. Read through what you've written so far...
I'm not saying that's the only way to do it. But on this model you take your knowledge of what comes next with you into the dream. The amount of times you do this is a quantifiable quality of your writing.
I don't think we should *simply* retire it. I think we should all stab it with daggers until it tumbles down the stairs like Caesar. We should all have a hand in its gruesome bloodletting.
xxxjimmy
Write it, write it, 'casue I wanna read it!
Robin
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