Don't Explain

Poets, don't explain your poetry in your poetry reading. Just read the damn poems. Nobody cares how or why you wrote them, or when or where. If the poem needs an explanation, you haven't written it well enough. If it needs an anecdote, then put the anecdote in the poem itself. If your explanation is better, more engaging, more interesting, than the poem, then your poem is no good anyway. Toss it.

Today in my reading my plan is to read some translations of Juan Gelman, selections from "The Beaches of Northern California" and "The Thelonious Monk Fake Book," and "After Michael Palmer." I might do "The Complete Sentence Game" too, which is a poem that is improvised and takes a different shape every time.

The Perfect Sleep Game

In the perfect sleep game, instead of trying to fall asleep, simply describe to yourself the characteristics of "the perfect sleep."

For me, for example, the perfect sleep would begin with a a half hour of describing "the perfect sleep to myself," of playing "the perfect sleep" game. As I played this game, describing to myself the perfect sleep, I would gradually become more relaxed and drift off into sleep. I would have consumed alcohol in very moderate proportions before; not so much as to become dehydrated and disturb my sleep. At about 11:30 I would be asleep. I would not be "dead to the world," but in another kind of life, alert in some dimension as though I was actually asleep. I would be neither too hot nor too cold. I would feel, as I was sleeping, that I was resolving some problem, but rather effortlessly. The problem would be that of being tired. Sleep would be refreshing. My dreams would be intermittent and also oriented toward the resolution of problems. My mind would be alive, working in another dimension, but still at work in some sense. Then there would be a period of very deep sleep, in which the mind would essentially shut down for a period, say between 2 and 4 a.m. This would be pure rest. in the wee small hours. In the early morning hours before wakefulness, dreams might resume. I might have to get up and pee, but without really fully waking up. Sleep would resume quickly. Dreaming would become more active, and oriented toward the coming day.

Wakefulness would arrive gradually. There would be no particular pressure about waking up, no nervousness about the day to come. I would probably have to pee again, but this would be a relief rather than a burden. I'd probably waken with an erection even in the absence of overtly sexual thoughts. The radio would come on at about the time that I anticipated it. Some shallow sleep, of low but pleasant quality, might ensue. There would be pleasant tension between the pleasure of remaining half-dormant and of gaining gradually in altertness. A sense that the problems of the night have been resolved.

Every night that one plays "The Perfect Sleep" one might refine the definition of what the perfect sleep might entail, rather than repeating one's definition verbatim.

Next in "Games for Insomniacs": "Pornographic Novel.'

Melody

The way you play this game is to relax and let any tune you want pop into your head. Then you can play that tune as long as you want or shut it off and wait for the next one to come.

The problem is that the tunes might continue to play unwanted into your sleep. I had the Pastoral playing all night long and couldn't shake it. If you are prone to "earworms" you might not want to play this game.

What ever happened to Conrad Aiken? He won all the awards back in his day. Yesterday I played apophatic bookstore for a spell before falling asleep. I also tried to look at my bookshelf at home when I was a kid, where a copy of the Preludes was almost certainly present. Maybe being born in the 1880s Aiken suffered comparisons with Stevens, Eliot, Williams, Pound, H.D., Moore, Stein, Cummings. There doesn't seem much room for a minor modernist.

To play "apophatic bookstore," you simply close your eyes and visit a bookstore in which you once spent a considerable amount of time but which no longer exists, or which you no longer have access to. You wander up and down the stacks and look for books that you might have once browsed through there. I had very specific images last night of books by Kafka and my first glimpse of Magritte. I have spent a good part of my life in bookstores.

Real insomniacs have already played any game I might invent. Maybe they should be games for aspiring insomniacs.

I'm working on more games for insomniacs--"The Apophatic Bookstore," "Symphony Orchestra," "Chicken Farm."

"Cento" is one I've used myself. You simply keep a steady stream of famous lines of poetry, or lines you've memorized in the past, going for as long as you can in your mind. You can use single lines, fragments, or whole poems, and break off a fragment whenever you wish and go on to something else.

Unlike "The Complete Sentence Game" Cento is not theoretically infinite. At a certain point you will run out of poetry to recite to yourself in your head. You will never run out of sentences.

"Sentence Fragment" resembles The Complete Sentence Game except you can freely intersperse fragments of sentences. Like this one. Or this one. Make sure you come to a full stop, marking the end of the fragment with a mental period.

I haven't been playing the complete sentence game much lately. I'm falling asleep too fast maybe.

Here's another one, called "walking out of the house and going down the street."

Close your eyes. Now, in as much visual detail as you can muster and in real time, or as close at you can get to it, go out of a house in which you lived as a child and walk down the street. Take note of everything you see. See how far you can get (walking or on your bicycle) from your house. Visit a park or a school. Try to fill in the spatial gaps if you can. ( Slowing yourself down helps quite a bit.) Try to have a conversation with a person you encounter--though I myself tend to find the streets empty of people as I play this game.

Now do the same with the place you live now. Leave the house or apartment in your mind's eye and get in your car or on your motorcycle and leave. Where can you go while keeping a consistent visual image. If it takes you twenty minutes to drive to Powell Symphony Hall, for example, you should try to make this trip last twenty minutes in your mind's eye.

Another variation on this is to move through the rooms of a childhood house, examining the objects you find there. You can open books you find on the shelf there and read them...

(You, like my students, probably think I am mildly insane.)

Last night I participated in a panel discussion with John Ashbery and Roberto Bolaño on "the writing process." I was very conscious of not being Mr Famous Writer so I was kind of embarrassed that I had to do this. Plus I had prepared nothing at all! While Ashbery spoke I took a walk through the building and decided on an approach. When it was my turn I began like this

'I am now playing 'The Complete Sentence Game.'" I proceeded to PERFORM and DEMONSTRATE the game for the audience, to no discernible reaction, producing well-formed sentences for about 5 minutes. I figured that as long as I kept the game going, I was doing ok.

(The fact that Mr Bolaño is no longer among the living tipped me off at some point that all was not right. I believe his intervention was on videotape.)

The "Page of Prose" Game

Close your eyes. Form the mental image of a page of prose with paragraphs of varying lengths. Imagine a font of your preference, Palatino maybe. Think about the width of margins.

That's the easy part. Now sharpen your image of the page so that you can discern the words that are written there. Imagine a series of ever less blurry lenses as you are being fitted for a new pair of reading glasses at the optometrist's. Start reading as many words as you can on your page. You probably won't be able to read the whole page, or even an entire paragraphs, but you will get some words and phrases. It's important that you don't simply "make up" your own words. Rather, you must read the words that are actually "there."

You might want to get really adept at the "Complete Sentence Game" before attempting this. Try to visualize every thought you have in the "Complete Sentence Game" as a written sentence. Then you may be ready to play the "'Page of Prose' Game."

I myself am barely able to play "Page of Prose" so don't feel discouraged if you can't do it right away. Next I will teach you how to play "Page of Verse."

I just realized that I described "The Complete Sentence Game" several years ago.

The Complete Sentence Game

1.

I will now play "The Complete Sentence Game." The idea is to formulate silent thoughts as well-formed, complete sentences, thus slowing down the speed of thought to that of (silent) speech. The sentences of the game can be about anything, though usually they end up describing the rules of the game itself or exploring its inner meaning. You will notice, playing the game, that other, quicker thoughts clamber in the background waiting to get into play. One part of the mind seems to be charged with the selection of which of these thoughts will get "the complete sentence treatment." Another part of the mind formulates the thoughts in slow sentences. What of the mind that generates the thoughts in the first place?

This is my reproduction in written form of the Complete Sentence Game, an approximation of a "typical" game. While I have played this game for many years I am not sure what its "purpose" is. It could be a writing excercise or a remedy for insomnia, since the forced slowness of the thoughts is conducive to a state of relaxed lucidity that often precedes sleep. When the mind can no longer formulate completed thoughts the game is lost and you have fallen asleep. I find it difficult to "write" a bad sentence while playing. I invite you to play too.

2.

This is the second section of "The Complete Sentence Game." Here I will continue to play, in written form and speaking less about the game itself and more about other implications of its playing.

Why do people think the unconscious is so interesting? Surely consciousness is far more interesting than some state of stupor. After all, it is only the conscious mind that can be interested. I know: I am supressing other thoughts in the back of my mind raising objections. What is interesting is hidden, enigmatic, unexplained in conscious terms. Now the unbearable slowness of the "game" takes hold. I want to able to think in sentences as fast as I can think in other, less well-formed fragments. The speed of writing also comes into play since, as noted above, this is only a simulation of the game itself--although in order to simulate it I have had to play it as I was writing.

3.

My hand hurts, ink-stained. I don't have to tell you that this is the third section of the prose-poem "The Complete Sentence Game." I really think the point of this poem is to teach you how to play it, since the sentences I am writing, though well-formed, might just as easily have been other sentences. I am giving you permission to pay attention to your thoughts. While this poem seems inadequate in many ways, I think that it is not the words on the page, but the game itself that these words and sentences instantiate. This fluid, thought-based poetics might be of use to you, at some point, whether you want to fall asleep or reach a state of heightened awareness

Right before I fall asleep every night, I play the “complete sentence game” in my head. The way you do it is to formulate every thought that you have as a complete grammatical sentence, silently speaking the thought, word by word. What is interesting is that the thought first appears “all of a sudden”—the process of thinking it out word by word is slow, at least compared to this initial flash of the thought. What is more, I articulate these thoughts so slowly, in relation to my rate of only half verbalized thinking, that I get several more ideas for other sentences before I finish the one I am consciously articulating at any given moment. By the time I finish I think of a new one instead of “saving” one I’ve thought up along the way. Some of the sentences concern the actual game, but I try to get off that metapoetic hobbyhorse fairly quickly. I might play this game for as long as 15 minutes or as short as 15 seconds before I drop off.

I am fascinated by Bernadette Mayer’s work: the idea of capturing that richness and density of ideas that might occur in a single hour or day. Even a minute would be quite an accomplishment. The essential problem is the same, except that writing is much slower even than the Complete Sentence Game. Thought can be rapid, but at the same time it feels unhurried, whereas the effort to get it all out on paper gives the false impression of excessive haste. Bernadette is able to do it in a work like “Mid-Winter’s Day.” Being really fast means you don’t have to hurry. A good quarterback experiences the play in slow motion, since the action on the field is, in fact, considerably slower than his decision-making process.

How much space can there be in a fast bebop tempo? Say, 280 bpm? Quite a bit, it turns out, even when a full measure of 4/4 goes by in under a second. The drummer might feel it in half time (140 bpm). (Not me, I have no hand speed.) On the other hand, an extremely slow tempo is all the more likely to be subdivided into smaller units.

***

How much more effective is Steve McQueen’s opened-eyed, steely blue-eyed gaze than the Clint Eastwood squint.


The ideas I have for writing in this blog are only limited by the amount of time I spend writing, not the number of thoughts that actually occur to me. I could try to blog for 24 hours straight, as an experiment, to see whether I ran out of things to say. On the other hand, I am inexperienced at this mode of writing, compared to Bernadette Mayer. I am thrilled that my poetry experiments are still up at the Poetry Project, along with hers.