epoetica

Damnit. I forgot to include this is my last post.
This is a timeline widget I created a few months ago. No content is there yet, but it is driven by an XML file and is a unique and curious way of navigating through content.
So explore this and give me ideas on how we can all play with this……what I could see is for us to choose a common theme then add poems and other bits, inviting others to contribute as well, until we build a history of curious creatures. So explore this and send me ideas via the e-mail list Davin has been using….. Jason

Sorry this comes a bit late everyone! I promise to be more prompt from now on … Something I’ve been mulling over for awhile:In a letter to John C. Thirlwall, dated June 13, 1955, William Carlos Williams writes: “The passage from Paterson which prompted my solution of the problem of modern verse…is to be found in Book 2, p. 96, beginning with the line: ‘The descent beckons.’ That after having been written several years before, where the implication of the variable foot first struck me” (Selected Letters 334). He then goes on to say that Einstein’s theory of relativity, the new “space-time,” has made necessary the creation of a new poetic form: “When Einstein promulgated the theory of relativity he could not have foreseen its moral and intellectual implication. He could not have foreseen for a certainty its influence on the writing of poetry” (Selected Letters, 335 - 336). In other letters, other essays, Williams also writes of how this new measure—the variable foot—must both sound over time and spatially mark the speech patterns of Americans (ie the poem must rhythmically unfold over time and it must spatially mark this particularly American rhythm). So for Williams, there is no such thing as a poem that is not both temporally and spatially alive. I’m fascinated with the variable foot – with the idea that a bookbound poem, as a precursor to a digital poem, is an object with its own kind of pulsating time and space. But it’s also a particularly elusive concept – just look at this excerpt from Paterson that Williams claims shows us the solution to the problem of modern verse! And what an impressive claim to make….

The descent beckons
        as the ascent beckoned
                Memory is a kind
of accomplishment
        a sort of renewal
                even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new
places
        inhabited by hordes
                heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
        since their movements
                are towards new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned)

There is something about the three-tiered line—strangely enough it’s the spacing!—that drives your eyes and mind on—it insists on a durational reading and insists that you not, as Williams writes only a few pages earlier, “Time Count! Sever and mark time!”

[what if conceptual art was taught in fifth grade? here is the assignment for this week, but accomplished by a 10 year old — and I will think about it this week]

In one year and out the other

From the point of view of 2006. We start off in INT. 2006’s apartment. 2006 items: various different bumper stickers, magazines, Meals, books, and other things from 2006. In the room there is a very, very white television in the center, and 2 very, very white telephones to either side. Other then that, everything in a cluttered mess there in the middle of this mess is someone in a costume that at first just looks like a very large pile of the same mess that clutters up the room. 2006 stands up and turns on the T.V. JOHN and JAMES and EMILY, the newscasters, are standing stage left, middle, and right, respectively.

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