Paradisatina
1.
I wish my life were more like the plot of a novel.
I wish the novel I am reading were my actual life,
that the story would lead to always
a place where the horizon met a large sky, under which I wander;
that the pages would fold there and liberate
and swirl and combine and disconnect and combine again in a perfect Jimi Hendrix sky of absolute possibility
I also wish that it were easier to imagine
a novel which reached so widely
that it would hold in its pages all camaraderie.
2.
Is it possible to have too much camaraderie?
When my room-mate talks, I stick my nose in a novel,
but her woes trail me so widely
I can’t help preferring literature to life.
Fictions are so much easier to imagine,
most often, but not always,
and illuminate the dense shadows with the cool effervescent glow of possibility.
The chords enlarge sound under a large sky, shimmer and wander
and liberate.
3.
Not the way the old and oily chiaroscuro started to liberate
light from dark, that most ancient form of camaraderie
unknown to me. Confined within myself, lost to paradise, I forwander,
looking for something novel,
less real estate than possibility —
a grand diversion which could fling my troubles, shooting widely,
knowing there will be Facebook. Always!
Although Facebook is hardly a substitute for life
and life can’t keep up with what I imagine.
4.
They tell me paradise is lost. So then imagine
Adam and Eve and their horned beasts themselves come to liberate
those lost in the compromised heaven of everyday life,
foundering in earnest committees and corporate camaraderie,
making profit under the guise of improvement. But not always
does Eve find salvation’s tedium sufficient. The same instinct that challenged ignorance leads her to outwander.
What to do when bliss is felt so widely
life feels like a twice-read novel
foreclosing possibility?
5.
But Eve and I are in this game for possibility.
She’s let me know she’s trying to imagine
I’m writing a “novel”
behind those gates too narrow to liberate.
Even emotions can grow outmoded when emoted widely
in the tumbledown garden of Eve’s allegorical life.
She cannot be inerrant. She must move within a constant question. To wander
as her mirrored image in my parallel Eden, I have left behind all camaraderie.
(I wasn’t a confessional guy always.)
6.
To water your lawn you need a garden hose, but not always.
A hose just points one way, but a sprinkler, ah, that creates a possibility
that when liquid life uncoils its length along the grass to sprawl in many-bladed camaraderie
it spreads many-minded Eve in ways not easy to imagine.
Like the way-faring stranger, her constant overwander
trespasses into my novel
muddling of the border between lousy writing and life,
while those who fear trespasses claim mere wandering would liberate:
“Better to find your own paradise than to surrender to the vision which is accepted widely.”
7.
How many on this earth are blind to life's folly? If only the remedy weren't agreed upon widely.
It’s a bad time for poetry, always
either too quick to condemn or too deliberate;
since repeating what’s been done seems the only possibility,
why not cover the bases by leading a multiple life?
yet how isolate, this camaraderie,
like everyone on the train reading the same bestselling novel,
frozen in fiction. This picture forbids Eve to imagine
to find an emptiness large enough within which her question can wander.
8.
Fierce. Acknowledging that death will stop her wander.
Yet death will freeze many things, and widely
clamp on our wriggle, and will it suffice to imagine
open doors before entering? But not always
announcing yourself is a novel
form of social silence: you may as well liberate
your hat from the coatrack, Jack; but, hey, what’s your hurry – isn’t camaraderie
among strangers the last best possibility
in this, the best of all possible sentences, life?
9.
Eve made this or that out of life
through the range of necessity. Her wander
brings ours into the domain of possibility.
Be kind to others; make it a trait that becomes coveted widely
enough to communicate a shape-shifting tale of camaraderie
moving at last to imagine
those blind to Eden, the sweetfool nostalgics who still berate.
“Have at least some scrap paper and a pencil stub on you, always.”
“Write what is beautiful and sad and put it in your novel.”
Envoi
Always wander widely
Liberate novel possibility
Imagine life, camaraderie
Friday, September 24, 2010
Paradisatina
A few weeks ago the Writhing Society composed a collaborative poem. Before we go into how that worked, here it is:
This is, as you may have guessed, a mutant sestina. Sestinas normally have six lines per stanza, each ending with a different non-rhyming word, and they run through six stanzas in which those end-words are recombined six ways, according to an algorithm. If the original order of end-words is 123456, the recombined order will be 615243. Then that order is recombined in the same way (so 364125), until every word has occupied every position in the stanza. The seventh repetition would reproduce the order of the first, but in place of a seventh stanza there is normally a three-line envoi where the six words reappear in both medial and final positions in each line.
The pleasure of this form lies in hearing the same words repeating in different positions, metrically and syntactically, and sometimes with different meanings, since words can function as more than one part of speech. For instance, "novel" in the Paradisatina can mean a book or the adjective meaning "new," and "wander" has been used as a verb and a noun and with various prefixes. In a rhyming poem, as soon as you get the scheme, you start to anticipate sound-repetitions, and a sense of order grows from the fulfillment of those successive expectations. A sestina, just as orderly, is a little harder to anticipate. You understand soon enough that the same words are cycling in a rigorous pattern, but the result is different in each stanza, and the repetition that really catches your attention is not of sound but of the words themselves, surrounded by all their meanings and connotations. The word that ends the last line of any stanza also ends the first line of the next stanza, as you will have noticed above.
"Paradisatina" is actually a nonina, nine nine-line stanzas. It is also a quenina, an oulipian term, since Raymond Queneau worked out that certain numbers will produce poems where x stanzas of x lines exhausts the algorithm. 9 is one such number, and the night the Writhing Society took up the form there were, by good luck, nine of us.
Our method: we each thought of three or four words, including a noun, a verb, an adjective and/or adverb (or any other part of speech) that suggested "paradise" to us. (Paradise is the theme of this year's show at Proteus Gowanus, where we meet.) We wrote them out on slips of paper and threw them into my old grey fedora. I shuffled them thoroughly and then went around the table, hat in hand, and each writher took a slip. The word on it was his or her word for that evening.
We each began a nonina. We wrote the first line, which ended in the word we had drawn, and then passed the paper to the person on our right. That person composed the next line, which had to end with the word he or she had drawn, and passed it again. Nine pieces of paper with nine developing noninas were traveling around.
The first stanza was easy. For the second we had to recombine according to the algorithm 918273645. What made this hard was that we were still passing pieces of paper to our right. Our order stayed the same, while the order of the words we had to use kept changing. If I had written the last line of the first stanza, I would write the first line of the second and pass it; easy enough. If, on the other hand, I had written the second line of the first stanza, my line would come as the fourth of the second stanza (you'll see 2 in the fourth position of the algorithm above), and I would have to place it there even though the first three lines (ending in words 9, 1, and 8) had not yet been written. So as this progressed — and it progressed slowly, we completed only two stanzas that evening, and left with headaches at all the math we had to do — we were filling in around what others had already written or else laying down lines that would have to serve others as directions for what they could write. That was the really interesting part and involved the fullest collaboration.
Then we decided to choose one of the nine emerging noninas and finish it so that we could read it at the "Poetry from Paradise" event at Proteus Gowanus. We decided to complete the composition by email. One of the original writhers could not participate, so another, who had not been present that first evening, stepped in. Another had to drop out soon afterwards, so one of us finished his lines for him. The document we passed began with the two stanzas completed, and it went on to give all the end-words in their proper places in the succeeding stanzas, so that people could find where their next line should go and put it in.
At first we passed following the order of the poem; we were each adding next lines that actually followed last lines. But time grew short, and around the beginning of stanza five participants were asked to add all their remaining lines, that is all the lines ending with their word. As before, where nothing else had been written, we were writing lines that fell where they fell. without knowing what came before or after them, or we were having to create a next line or a previous line to one someone else had already placed. I was in the clean-up position, placing lines in between other lines already written.
The result was what you see, including an envoi simply composed of our nine words. On Saturday, September 18th, we led off the "Poetry from Paradise" event. Each of us stood at a station around the perimeter of an audience seated in concentric circles, and each of us read his or her lines as they occurred. (We rehearsed.) The audience thus heard nine voices traveling from nine directions, carrying the poem forward in different timbres and rhythms, while the pattern of end-words slowly evolved through all its permutations.
The writers were: Corina Bardoff, Jacqueline Cantwell, Carrie Cooperider, Tom La Farge, Jennifer Nelson, Angelo Pastormerlo, Erik Schurink, Maria Schurr, and Wendy Walker. The readers were the same except that Janice Everett replaced Jennifer Nelson.
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