Each year one rich, paradigm-shifting discussion I have with my students centers around control in art. They insist initially that the artist is in absolute control of his/her work from conception to completion. Nothing unintended occurs. Then we read deconstructivist and psychoanalytic readings of The Scarlet Letter and other novels we’ve read. Then they’re exposed to William Burroughs’ cut-up method, to Brion Gysin and Bob Cobbing’s cut-ups, to the chance techniques of John Cage and Jackson Maclow, to Bernadette Mayer’s stream-of-consciousness/automatic writing. They ask why?
To see what happens when some control is relinquished. (See the As/Is blog for an example in process.) To see what can surface from the unconscious when it’s not filtered, censored, by the conscious. Then they ask if there can be too much control, too little?
I suggest that at some point every artist should yield control of some aspect of his/her work, especially if such a “surrender” breaks the work out of its habits, its ruts.
In the last year or two, I’ve been uncomfortable with my tendency to break lines off at phrases, clauses, making them predictable, numbing rather than stimulating; I’ve felt I had too much control, too many self-conscious transitions, from one stanza to another; I’ve sensed too much overall control of the tone of each piece, a push into a consistency that was limpid, an easy, soft unity.
Thus 7 X 7 was born a year ago. I have control, sure (can it ever be given up entirely?), but chance plays its part too. A draw of a playing card determines what mode I write in that day (from seven different modes) and that mode shapes the line break. Any connection between stanzas is accidental; any unity to the work “beyond my control.”
The results, as with all experiments, are mixed. Suffice it to say I have never written the kinds of things I have written in the last year. An example:
2 of Spades
At night, it is a relief to fall asleep to the hum of an air-conditioning unit instead of the crackle of small arms fire
If a big mouth fits, wear it.
But it wears thin, especially across a globe
northern eye war oven my plaque this often moon
after work-up my roam listing some mosaic
tinting some sturdy team in when off came on
could give a flying fuck about the boundaries, the barbed
walls flung up by far too many schools of poetry from San
Francisco to Iowa City to New York. I, too, love to read
poetry – it saved my life – I don’t want to take up arms
The stronger case for optimism lies
elsewhere. Corporate retrenchments may
be slowing, and other sources of job loss –
weak overall demand, an expanding trade
deficit – may be ebbing. As companies see
her eyes are misaligned, her mouth is sus-
piciously pursed, her stockings are bunched at
the knees, even the bobby pins on her white
headband have slipped below her eyes. Wearing
identical frocks, the girls are standing so close
that they seem to be joined in one body
He doesn’t know where or how to begin. His lines, some
straight, some arced, arched, twisted and turned
around another, abrupt, rude or opaque white, don’t
signal the start he desired. But that’s something,
finally, desire, which perhaps leads to birth,
to a helpless life crawling, a bubbling, toddling,
skipping, shuffling. Isn’t this beginning really an end
Relevant quotation, added 3-4-04, from Lyn Hejinian's My Life in the Nineties:
"The focus of one's work may lie somewhere other than where one thinks one is focusing." (p.65)
Which implies: The focus of one's work may lie where one thinks one is focusing. What it may come down to is how much an artist intends to "focus," which I think is concentration of self, intense intention, in a particular work. Jackson Maclow's focus is on the process. The work takes its own focus as far away from the artist as made possible by the technique.