Honestly I don’t really like to write about prose so much because, in a way that seems true for me about prose and not so much about poetry, the practice of prose is both theory and practice. It’s one body. I mean discourse gives poets an opportunity to write prose and I think that is a pleasure in itself but prose writers, and even ones like myself who like to call themselves fiction writers or non-fiction writers and “poet,” too, depending on the mood, I think, would rather just do it and have it contain all its marvels, including thought about itself. There’s nothing about fiction or non-fiction that can’t contain thinking about itself and extrapolating about that. It’s like dropping your pen and noticing the room and then sitting up and keeping going. It’s like getting up to make tea or shitting or something like that. Thinking about the practice and the practice itself are part of the same territory in fiction so of course when you asked me to do this I thought oh fuck but I am working on a book. I don’t want to stop and do that. So I’m on the train to go see my mother so today’s the day. Which is prose. And while poets writing about poetry creates societies, movements, sociality, to write prose about prose is to label yourself one of those. Because I honestly think prose writers would mostly just look at you and think why don’t you just do it. And I can’t hide it. I am a poet, I am a fellow traveller, one of those. And poetry is what gave me the idea that I could do something different in prose because poetry has a tendency to tell you you can do anything. And to tell the truth poetry is what actually enabled me to write the prose I wanted to write. I much more wanted to write prose as a young person than poetry but poetry seemed to showcase my bad qualities to good effect (energy, impatience, instability) where my prose seemed doomed because of my bad qualities (energy, impatience, instability). In prose to write something longer than a single story demanded that I return to it again, and it being not just the piece of writing but a state of mind, and a feeling about what writing was and what was I doing and who or what was in the piece of writing and what did they look like today. Who or what is writing. No day in prose looked like any other day whereas in poetry no minute looked like any other minute. But in that minute I may have already written an entire poem or two. Within the act of writing a poem one can be like a hockey player endlessly turning corners. ’Cause after all, that is a mind. And the body was sitting in the room. There was no problem with that.
The prose problem was time. Since we are always going forward, how can we make anything long. It makes me sad just to think about that. How can it ever be a home. I feel devastated. I think I want that of my writing. For it to be a place where I throw my stuff down and face this screen and “I” kind of vanish somehow, blend into it, or the meaty part of the hand slides against paper smoothing the pages that have never asked for that like my writing is a hoof that meets that gate of the day page after page like whatever you call that softened step at the bottom of the doorframe that actually looks kind in any public space where hundreds or thousands have passed over so the years and the feet have made the doorstep smooth and all the pages get this treatment (I mean if you write by hand. I’m not) as the hand absently caresses the paper as it’s leaving in the rush of its thoughts. It’s amazing to think of the intervention of all the parts of our body while we write. The back that aches. The shoulders that hunch. The fingers that peck and get tiny pleasures in each tap and click. I’ve never noticed it till now but people I’ve lived with have noted that it’s clear I learned to write in the day of the manual typewriter since all you can hear in the next room as I’m touching my sensitive Mac is pound pound. Really. My fingers are loud. I’m slamming. And it probably comes through in the writing. What would the work of the heavy-fingered writer look like. You know that resounding thoughtful click. It’s satisfaction. There’s a smash-the-key-once moment. An attack kind of way of approaching this thing. Thought. As out there red weeds and dry white trees and white metal industrial landscapes grow. My first thought in college when I wrote stories was to write about something that had actually happened but pretend that it was fake. By fake I mean art. I knew what stories sounded like but I only had stories that happened to me but I thought what if I got the voice absolutely right and treated the kid like a character in a movie. I saw Fassbinder films in college at the same time I was trying to write stories and those films scared me because everything was so heavy and vulgar and excessive. Everything seemed worse than it was. And I felt like unless things were worse they wouldn’t even make a mark. So that was my first “fake.” I thought for the story of what had actually happened it must emboss. It must have excessive weight not so anyone would believe the story but so they would believe the art. In Russia in the nineties you saw all these buildings that hadn’t been pulled down yet everything looked so used. It had a thirties style but every door stop (these were the originals) was smooth. Humanness seemed to be the watery pressure of time on public and private spaces. There was less shame about the masses of bodies and where they had been. It seems American for things to be new and special. People to not show. Just cartoons. And Russia just made me want to cry because it was so clear that the people had always been there. Everything felt like a monument. Every public moment felt staged. I also think about cartoons and how safe they always make things seem in that the strong black line is dividing one thing from the next. It was linguistic, it was pure design and I guess I’ve always aimed at an exaggerated ordinary in my own writing and it was the first intervention I knew. Some weight. To regard all the surfaces of your existence in retrospect as monumental spaces and for that to be subject matter in itself, a style. Really mundane excess. But after that first flock of little stories in college I was really stuck. Because it seemed like prose was designed to produce something longer and I didn’t know how that could happen. But you know in writing dynamics that involve length we’re really just talking about energy. Conditions of temperament that produce torpor and feelings of hopelessness. And flight. Motility. Writing prose is an emotional deal. La Batarde by Violette Leduc came into my hands from a woman younger than me named Kate who we were hanging around with in the late seventies. She handed me this big fat book. And there right at the top Violette was proclaiming — at some really late age like 40 or 50, it was clearly after her life she was writing from — and she said how much she hated her mother. She had hated this woman forever and now here she was in all that squalor in a backyard somewhere listening to her mother’s vile words and platitudes. The delight this opening triggered in me was ionizing. It was like a waterfall. Then of course the pure language surge of the whole book. There was vast permission to write in this very liminal language mid poetry and prose. She had entirely moved the template around with that very first statement and then she followed it up with something uncanny. I mean the slippage in terms of “form.” I have to say there’s a stack of uncategorizable books. And this book’s teetering on the top of it. La Batarde might call itself a memoir because it certainly is reporting on something more or less like Violette Leduc’s life but the medium of the book is thrumming between the factual and the fantastic and the measure of this medium (to the extent that it is visible) is feeling. The musicality of when it is reportage and when we are dwelling in inner shadier states establishes the feeling. The girls’-school sex scene in this book is still my favourite sex scene in all writing because she follows an inner liveliness that is all light and wings. This scene reminds me in retrospect of Benjamin’s thing about translation that you call into a work to produce its echo and Leduc was doing that with her own life — like it was a magician’s trunk we could occasionally enter. There was such privacy and such intimacy in this work. Mainly I was moved by her bravery (she could say those things, she could use that stuff) and her incandescence and also her extravagance. That it protected both her and me somehow.
Of the incandescence I just want to say that it’s not unlike the duration of a sound, how it decays. The energy in an experience depicted fades in prose and the energy continues to drop and it keeps giving shape like the fading account of a dream in your head and this I think is what Woolf means when she talks about flow. Or perhaps she’s being English and I’m being American thinking about power, or radiance that connects moments to moments not as an articulation but more like a sonic or energetic reach. Moments go in prose. And in life.
I visited Gerrit Henry once in 1982 with David Rattray, and Gerrit as a book dealer brought out treasure after treasure of what he had lately found and what he had been reading. Robert Walser had just been republished at the time. David and I were really drunk on that visit and I remember Gerrit telling us that Robert Walser wrote all these little things that made this big thing. That he simply piled it on in his work. An accumulation as opposed to a progression. I can hardly remember the words he used but I had a vision of strong bold stripes producing a pattern that filled time in a different way than narrativity since that was clearly the problem that I couldn’t figure out — since nothing was ever the same from day to day, how could a book go on. Gerrit reduced, or my translation of what he said on that warbling day, was that a book could be composed like a painting. Some of this then some of that. Again more like poetry than “a novel” but the idea that someone did write novels like that gave me confidence to proceed hoping to and trying to compose in that way. Around that same time you heard a lot about electronic literature. Hypertext had everyone’s tongues hanging out. And I guess the freedom for there to be a moment in a piece of writing when the reader could choose to go this way or that because someone had programmed a piece of writing that way seemed kind of wonderful but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read that book. I would feel like a dog. On a complex but all the same leash. And I definitely didn’t want to write that book but it gave me an idea. I thought what if the juncture felt like you could feel the author making a decision. And then you would make it. I always loved thinking about how it felt to hear those records in the sixties and seventies where you would hear the musician’s fingers scraping on the frets. Those electronic bumps. And when Dylan would gasp and laugh in the studio you felt you were in the room too. And likewise in a story, if a paragraph bumps a bit against the prior paragraph. If it doesn’t quite fit. Then it makes the composition real. It’s an uh. And scar tissue. And I also love films. How the visual pun of a paw to an arm of a chair or a dragged voice from one scene to the next creates the flow that pulls the reader along with you. Though I called my own inferno “a poet’s novel” as if it were a subgenre I very often hate poet’s novels because the freedom they seem to claim is a disinterest in whether anyone keeps reading. Which makes me think of Leslie Scalapino. She put together a fat triple volume of poetry and she subtitled it a novel. When I asked her why she explained that someone might read it from front to back because novels usually get read that way. Her desire was the most important part of this story for me. I really don’t mind if you pick my book of poetry up and put it down and read it later on the toilet or in a café or in ten years. I wrote it that way. It’s legal. But the dream of fiction for me like the dream of a film is flow. I don’t want you to separate from me the narrator. I want you to be tricked forward by your need for distraction and I want the shapes I put in the road to seem accidental so rather than being controlled you’ll feel attracted. Helplessly so. I want you to want. So I think about how a poetry reading proceeds and an abstract poem might be followed by something more anecdotal and something short and two longs. Also as a poet I don’t abandon any old style because I might need it. I like to thrift in my closet of possible poems. The rhythm of the reading holds the audience. The rhythm of a novel is also a kind of recitation. I like to make a book of an assembly of frags. I like to do some research in the realm of the book so there’ll be a chapter where you actually go someplace and you can even see the writer out there trying to drum up some material. That’s a kind of fret. Kind of an authenticating moment. She’s not stuck. She’s improvising in the world. She’s on the train right now madly tweeting.