Talking Poetics
The
blackness of my notebooks, large and small, on my desk directly behind my
laptop. Not many; the earliest dates back to 1983. There are others – collaged journals in
three-ring binders that parallel twenty years of the making of these black ones
(and one blue intruder), and an early set of notebooks (also black) – but they
don’t count, here. These are the ones that matter, and they sit here on my desk
not out of nostalgia, but because I still use them. They are still eminently
utile.
It
might be reasonably expected that I jot down drafts of poems in them, early
jabs at a constellation of words. But maybe I’m not reasonable, because I
don’t. I write on my laptop (and before it, my typewriter), needing, as Charles
Olson explicated in his essay “Projective Verse,’ the visual organization of
text. I guess I’m a modernist that way.
Anyway,
my notebooks don’t comprise drafts. They comprise individual lines, an ongoing
accumulation thereof. Some explanation of what I mean is in order.
By
the late 1970s, my writing had become, let us say, “constipated.” In my poetry
I sought to distil things down to their essence, to the diamond at the
compressed end of carbon. The extraneous (or so I thought it to be) was hewed
away, leaving, well, leaving not very damn much. Alas, not so much diamond as
constipated turd.
It
was a dead end, and I began to realize it. So under the sway of Brion Gysin and
William S. Burroughs, whom I’d been intensely reading, I began to experiment
with the cut-up. I used newspaper articles about the oil crisis of 1979 (in the
midst of which I drove a friend to Pittsburgh, returning to Canada via Windsor
and damn near running out of gas before I crossed the border) that I cut into
small rectangles and glued to large sheets of cardboard. I didn’t transcribe
exactly what I found there, but close enough. Wrote some prose pieces, some of
which was published, and began to ponder what I was doing, whether or not this
was a possible way forward. The cut-up as I was working with it was a bit
awkward and laborious, and while I was deeply interested in how it wonderfully
skewed things and opened up entirely new vistas, I wondered how it might be
managed differently.
I
remember, during that time, mis-reading something in a magazine and finding it
hilarious. When I thought about it after the laughter subsided, I realized that
it was also very useful. Mis-readings, mis-hearings – those moments when
meaning slips about accidentally, bumps headlong into preconception and
expectation, then heads off entirely elsewhere…. THIS was useful and
interesting stuff. My first major literary influence had been the work of the
French Surrealists, so I incorporated free-association into the mix, and began
writing stuff in my notebooks as it emerged or as I encountered it. There was
no attempt made to link individual thoughts that were transcribed as lines in
my notebook, no attempt at that kind of coherence - no attempt, in other words, at poetry, no
imposition of any kind of narrative. It was (and still is) a dissociative free-for-all. Randomness and chance are fecund
and generative of the new (so I found great sympathy with, and encouragement
from, Nobel laureate Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the
Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology).
So
chance became my poetics; it set me free, liberated me from the overbearing tyranny
of my ego, from the narratives my mind would be determined to set into words.
Rarely, now, do I sit down to write a poem with something in mind (and if I do,
they mostly turn out like crap). Instead, I turn to one of my notebooks,
leafing through the pages looking for a line that catches, that resonates, and
this I set down, finding another somewhere else that catches and resonates with
the former and setting it down… Get where I’m headed? Okay, then. Just so you
know: I hope I never do. The poetics of chance, of the accident, of a very real
form of abandonment, leads me forward now. Poems are always surprises, not just
semantic templates of some conscious thought, transcriptions of what’s kicking
around in my head. I’m really not that interesting, and anyway, my life or
thoughts really aren’t anyone else’s business. Oh, occasionally poems crop up
that are telling of slight aspects of my life, but they’re rare and infrequent.
Good.
I prefer the accidental. I’ll stick with that.
Gil
McElroy
October
26, 2019 (JD 2458783)
Gil McElroy is a poet
and artist living in Colborne, Ontario. His most recent book, Long Division, will be published by
University of Calgary Press in 2020.
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