CONSIDERING IDEAS FOR YOUR OWN WRITING

I came across this little gem of a phrase today in Axlerod's Reading Critically when I was preparing for my composition class. It was a subheading of a chapter. Initially, the entire phrase was formatted as above in caps.; however, for reasons outlined in my previous post, I will refer to the phrase in lowercase.

The authors probably intended for the phrase to mean something like "this is how to come up with ideas for your writing." However, when subjected to interpolation and taken out of context (and word sense) as it is, "considering" could just as easily be seen as an adjective describing the types of "ideas" for the writing - "considering ideas," or "ideas of considering" for your own writing.

Yet, "considering ideas for your own" could just as easily be an adjective phrase describing the writing - it is writing primarily concerned with "considering ideas for your own." (This type of writing does not care about considering ideas for you. Rather, it recommends you do that on your own.)

"Own" is working particularly hard here considerating its (1) primary definition: Belonging to oneself. In this sense, the "considering ideas" are for your "own" (posession) = you get to keep the ideas. Or rather, (2) consider its secondary definition: Used to express immediate or direct kinship, where "own" could be "family" or "fruit of the loins;" - yes, this is "writing" regarding "considering ideas" for your own "fruit" (read: your flesh and blood).

But before you raise the issue, I am well aware that I completely neglected "for," a word that I have savored for the very end, for "for" is not only a preposition indicating "related to," but it could also be seen as a preposition meaning "because of," and in this case, the considering ideas are "because of" "your own writing:" indicating that the ideas under consideration are in this state as a direct result of the power of "your" writing (what ever kind of writing that happens to be).

Slow Children At Play

For my first exploration in meaning, I have chosen a fairly common street sign, and one with obvious discrepancies in meaning, mostly for initial illustrative purposes - the sign that reads
"Slow // Children // At Play."

Now obviously, I realize that by putting the language of the sign into typescript, I have already begun altering its meaning because it no longer exists in its previous visual state.

Among the casualties of this occurrence are: the yellow background, the border, and of course the running stick figure (a tragedy in its own right). This particular running stick figure also has its own strange embellishments which make its loss that much more poignant.

Yet, from a less visual and more linguistic perspective, the loss of the capital letters in my rendition is perhaps the most direct impact of my disturbance of the language from its natural habitat. Yet, I felt that keeping the entire phrase in caps. would also alter the meaning too significantly, since the phrase would appear to be screaming "SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY!" (exclamation point added for dramatic effect), and this would no doubt disturb our natural adherence to meaning. So, for the most unadulterated rendition of meaning, I have decided to refer the phrase with simple caps. at the beginning of each letter: "Slow Children At Play."

Now with the logistics of the phrase out of the way we can proceed with our interpolation.

Clearly, the purpose of the sign is to signal drivers to be aware and drive slowly as there may be neighborhood children about, playing, running and whatnot. In this interpretation, "Slow" is an imperative (although it is clearly missing a period), and "children at play" is a warning (although, again, it has the issue of periods and the larger grammatical issue of fragmentation as this phrase is missing a verb). Despite the obvious grammatical issues, I am sure that the repetition of this phrase in its familiar arrangement does serve the purpose of slowing drivers.

However, as many of you have no doubt already interpolated, the phrase could be reinterpreted with "slow" as an adjective referring to "children" if taken slightly out of its context. And while the phrase would not, then, slow drivers, it would then serve to alert them to the "special" presence of children (albeit insensitively).

And while this is a fine interpolation, it still could make better use of the words "at" and "play," which originally could be seen as a preposition and noun respectively - "at play." However, when "play" is seen as a verb and "at" as a noun. "At" becomes the object of the special children's' play - they are at-playing, or themselves playing with "at."

And in this sense, they themselves become a certain type of interpolator.

Back from the Dead

I decided to revive my blog but realized that it was far too gone for its own (or anyone else's) good. Though there were some good points, I came to realize that I didn't want to contribute to any of the other wasted space out there with an undirectional and unpurposeful blog. So I decided that I would slip Diagnosis of a Lovely Person eternallyinto its own sweet abyss and reincarnate it as Adianoeta (or literally "double entendre").

But I didn't simply change the name, I changed the purpose. I intend for Adianoeta to be a blog about meaning and disturbing it through definiative and literal alternative readings of segments of language. I hope to reread and literally challenge contented lines and poems, as well as pieces of found langauge from other books, signs, oral, etc... Privately, I have been doing this for some time, and I can't say exactly how it will work in writing, but we shall see in a series of experiments I have planned for the up-and-coming posts.

The Pleasure of Reading Zukofsky

At the beginning of the summer, I bought several new books from Amazon with the intention of getting to them all. So far I've done a fairly descent job, but one book has been sitting on my nightstand ever since I opened it: The Complete Short Poetry of Louis Zukofsky (which is ironically the book I was most excited about).

I have not purposefully been trying to snub Mr. Zukofsky. I have opened it several times and read several poems, but each time, I've ended up more and more confused about exactly what I was reading. I turned to Robert Creeley's introduction to try to gain some insight, and I found it somewhat helpful. Creeley advised keeping Zukofsky's own definition of poetry in mind, "The test of poetry is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection. This is its purpose as art." I tried to read it aloud as Creeley also suggests, and I did find pleasure in the sight and sound and the obscurely juxtaposed lines of thought, but I was still not convinced that I had cracked Zukofsky.

Fortunately, a few weeks ago, Silliman posted an interesting link to an article called Betting on Poetry by Joel Jensen about the difficulty of reading Zukofsky "cold." I could definitely sympathize with his trouble, and some of the comments to the blog were helpful, but it still didn't help me read Zukofsky.

Then again, a few days ago, Silliman posted another link to a very clearly articulated article called Louis Zukofsky Selected poems by Mike Bengal, which I highly recommend. In it, he suggests that a comment by T.E. Hulme is extremely helpful for reading Zukofsky:

"language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise – that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language... Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas (Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism”)."

Bengal connects this to Zukofsky by claiming that:

"Zukofsky’s work preeminently reflects an awareness of the socially-constructed nature or “communal” aspect of language. He allows it to take center stage, rather than trying to make it bend to his will. He “struggles” with it, in the sense that he disbelieves in language as direct representation, but is nonetheless concerned with what and how it might signify in other ways, and how it relates to the realities of the material world."

He then goes on to develop several examples of Zukofsky exposing the inadequacy of language to communicate ideas other than the communal ideas in the readers' minds and how Zukofsky treats language as an object (hence, Creeley's emphasis on sight and sound in the poems). I won't recount all the details, but I will suggest that you take a look for yourself.

After reading it, I returned to Zukofsky fresh and began reading his 43 section poem "Anew," and I found that Bengal's suggestions had radically altered my persepective. I could see how Zukofsky exposes language. For example, the first section in the poem goes:

I walked out, before
"Break of day"
And saw
Four cabins in the hay.

Blue sealed glasses
Of preserves - four -
In the window-sash
In the yard on the bay.

Further:
The waters
At the ramp
Running away.

Clearly, the poem has a lyricalness, and a visualness, and interesting juxtaposition, but considering Bengal's idea of Zukofsky exposing the inadequacy of language, the poem reaches a new level of insight and genius.

Automatically, a reader might envision four cabins in a field, with jars in the windows, beside a river, and yes, those images are there, but if you consider the actual images and relations of the words as they appear, the poem becomes ridiculous. "Four cabins in the hay," for instance, is not four cabins in field (which the mind automatically might make it), but more literally, it could be four cabins (like toys) in a pile of hay. Also, the "blue sealed glasses" literally are sealed with blue, and the "window-sash" becomes not wood but fabric. Furthermore, they are in the yard on the "bay" about which Zukofsky claims in his following note:

"[bay] should convey something of all the meanings of the word 'bay': red-brown, the laurel, the laurel wreath, a bay horse, a deep bark or cry, a window-bay, a large space in a barn for storage as of hay or fodder, the state of being kept at a standstill, but more specifically two meanings that seemed to include all the others, they are, an arm of the sea, and a recess of low land between hills."

The more literally we take Zukofsky's words, the more inadequate they become for expressing any particular idea but only as much as the reader can formulate. This, I considered to be my first real encounter with Zukofsky.

I went on to read the rest of the sections, and I found that they are all radically different exposures of language. The pleasure, it seems to me now, of reading Zukofsky is the pleasure of reading the words themselves together as they appear in their odd constructions and keeping up with his own cunning exposures of language.

Poetry vs. Rhetoric

Kenneth Goldsmith raises some very tantalizing points in his sentences on conceptual writing - especially considering the fact that I have spent the the last two months working on the same poem (!). Exhausted with all these wasted hours and lines, I am literally one conceptual manifesto away from abandoning every creative impulse and poetic technique I've ever learned, then tearing up my books.

It has been some time since I have put up a post. I have been mostly busy with getting married, honeymooning, settling in, etc... but I have been working and reading. Hopefully, I haven't completely alienated my small readership. I did come across this very interesting collection of audio readings from Ted Berrigan on the UPenn website. Check it out.