Monday, April 9, 2012

Conversation One: William Murch



In particular in this conversation Ondaajte talks to Murch about re-editing Apocalypse Now. In this still we see the disembodied figure of Aurore Clementé behind the mosquito net. In this version she stays a ghostly figure, in the original Martin Sheen's character grabs her and they made love. The choices an editor makes upon discovery of connections, in this one she becomes a ghostly hovering silhouette and then you are back on the boat. This ghostliness unlocked the possibility of a new language for the version to be cut 24 years after the original. Trusting in the originality of the vision and the process that is more amazing the more original that vision is - that is the miracle of film making for Murch.

The shooting style of this film involved actors looking straight into the frame, the unwritten rule of what not to do, except maybe in a comedy. The idea of "breaking the frame" - would happen often, yet it was never talked about on set. He thinks maybe it was because of the intense subjectivity of the film that this was possible and accepted

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Film Editing and Writing

Ondaatje is someone I admire deeply for his passionless pursuit of words across forms. His curiosity of creation - from his involvement in Brick, the literary journal to this new book I have discovered by him where he records his conversations with the film editor Walter Murch.

With my thesis exploring writers who push the formal boundaries of the novel and my creative work having a strong attachment to the idea of the visual and what audiences can process in a given time frame this book is of great interest.

Ondaatje outlines how he  had been obsessed "in that seemingly uncrossable gulf between an early draft of a book or film and a finished product. How does one make that journey from here to there?" (ph xii) Ondaajte would spend two years of any book her wrote, he outlines, in the edtiting stage. After spending 4-5 years writing in the dark he will then have to give it shape.....having a supervisor who is a passionate structuralist and being a formless, organic writer means that we are often at very different places when trying to look at what I am writing. Thankfully he has allowed me to just write for a while after seeing a couple of my attempts at trying to write to an imposed structure. Ondaajte talks about never having a strict, controlling governor present in the first draft of a book.

"I write as if it were a rehearsal, I attempt or try out everything, though of course a subliminal editing is taking place." (pg 37) He talks about, reassuringly for me anyway, that he never knows where a book will end or a concept or a plot

"I'm much more uncertain, insecure....I am continually being fed and diverted by the possibilities from the world around me - chance anecdotes overheard, the texture within a rumour - as much as by what my research reveals.....When writing I reject nothing." (pg 38)

He feels it is dangerous to show his work to anyone at this stage, until he has taken it as far as it can go. He doesn't want the outside influence of story or form to come to early - I get that!!! As Murch concurs it is all about balancing the generative impulse with the critical impulse. In editing film, he records his primary, emotional response to the rushes as he says "There is only one "first time."" (pg 45) - the rest are more surgical responses. The difference is that film is more bound by time than a book - a book is not finite so it can be more meditative. It feels more private - however they discuss the difference between watching a film on video and going to the cinema. They talk about a "cinematic state of mind." - the urge to be part of something larger than yourself but to be spoken to directly. Murch believes we are able to keep up with the incredible non-linear jumps in film because the same visual dislocations happen all the time when we dream. We spend eight hours every night in a "cinematic dream state" and so he concludes we are familiar with this type of reality. ( pg 50)

Walter Murch talks about the use of silence in film editing -- how strong and dangerous it can be. This reminded me of when I created a television advert for a play I had produced - Salt Creek Murders, where I chose to have no sound, just the subliminal wind from the salt plans on the Coorong. It worked, people turned immediately to their TV sets wandering what was wrong as they were so used to the nagging, incessant noise of the television. Murch as edited films such as The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and of course The English Patient where he met Ondaajte. He points out that it wasn't until the introduction of synchronous sound in film in 1927  that silence was ever used as there was continuous orchestral or music accompaniment underneath the images.

Murch, as an interesting aside came to film editing after an early love of playing with sounds tapes when he was 11. he believes that your chances of happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that reflects what you loved most when you are between 9 and 11 years old.

He talks about how many films were and still are edited by women, particuarly before sound, as sound was somehow a "man" thing, because it was seen as electric. Before then "it was a woman's craft...you knitted the pieces of film together. And editing has aspects of being a librarian, which used to be perceived as a woman's job." (pg 26)

Another interesting point, given my interest in women's crafting or playing with the novel form, certainly Dorothy Porter saw her sewing or crafting of stories together. In my novel for the thesis I am working with multiple points of view - Murch outlines how the more POV's the more time you can buy for your film with an audience. The more linear the film the shorter it should be. in his opinion. "Films with a single point of view are on borrowed time, if they are more than two hours long." (g 33) Or as he says a symphony can be longer than a sonata  - it is just a richer tapestry.

Ondaajte then talks  about  what we have borrowed from Spanish Poetry - the idea of "leaping poetry" - "those sometimes surreal, sometimes subliminal connections that reveal a suprising or revealing path or link between strangers.." (pg 34)

The discussion leads into the idea of form -

"What we call form is love." (Ernst Toller) - How beautiful is that!

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Anne Sexton

It suprised me to read that throughout her severe breakdowns she approached sending poetry to publishers in such a professional way. Filing rejection letters and sending poems out up to 35 times to different journals etc. For all her low self-esteem she was able to take the continual rejection. Within two years of penning her first ever poem she was published in leading magazines all over the country, all in the midst of psychotherapy and motherhood.


Heart's Needle 
by W. D. Snodgrass

For Cynthia
When Suibhe would not return to fine garments and good food, to his houses and his people, Loingseachan told him, "Your father is dead." "I'm sorry to hear it," he said. "Your mother is dead," said the lad. "All pity for me has gone out of the world." "Your sister, too, is dead." "The mild sun rests on every ditch," he said; "a sister loves even though not loved." "Suibhne, your daughter is dead." "And an only daughter is the needle of the heart." "And Suibhne, your little boy, who used to call you 'Daddy' he is dead." "Aye," said Suibhne, "that's the drop that brings a man to the ground."
     He fell out of the yew tree; Loingseachan closed his arms around him and placed him in manacles.

—after The Middle-Irish Romance
     The Madness of Suibhne
1

Child of my winter, born
When the new fallen soldiers froze
In Asia's steep ravines and fouled the snows,
When I was torn

By love I could not still,
By fear that silenced my cramped mind
To that cold war where, lost, I could not find
My peace in my will, 

All those days we could keep
Your mind a landscape of new snow
Where the chilled tenant-farmer finds, below,
His fields asleep

In their smooth covering, white
As quilts to warm the resting bed
Of birth or pain, spotless as paper spread
For me to write,

And thinks: Here lies my land
Unmarked by agony, the lean foot
Of the weasel tracking, the thick trapper's boot;
And I have planned

My chances to restrain
The torments of demented summer or
Increase the deepening harvest here before
It snows again.
2

   Late April and you are three; today
      We dug your garden in the yard.
   To curb the damage of your play,
Strange dogs at night and the moles tunneling,
   Four slender sticks of lath stand guard
      Uplifting their thin string.

   So you were the first to tramp it down.
      And after the earth was sifted close
   You brought your watering can to drown
All earth and us.  But these mixed seeds are pressed
   With light loam in their steadfast rows.
      Child, we've done our best.

   Someone will have to weed and spread
      The young sprouts.  Sprinkle them in the hour
   When shadow falls across their bed.
You should try to look at them every day
   Because when they come to full flower
      I will be away.
3

The child between them on the street
Comes to a puddle, lifts his feet
   And hangs on their hands. They start
At the Jive weight and lurch together,
Recoil to swing him through the weather,
   Stiffen and pull apart.

We read of cold war soldiers that
Never gained ground, gave none, but sat
   Tight in their chill trenches.
Pain seeps up from some cavity
Through the ranked teeth in sympathy;
   The whole jaw grinds and clenches

Till something somewhere has to give.
It's better the poor soldiers live
   In someone else's hands
Than drop where helpless powers fall
On crops and barns, on towns where all
   Will burn. And no man stands.

For good, they sever and divide
Their won and lost land. On each side
   Prisoners are returned
Excepting a few unknown names.
The peasant plods back and reclaims
   His fields that strangers burned

And nobody seems very pleased.
It's best. Still, what must not be seized
   Clenches the empty fist.
I tugged your hand, once, when I hated
Things less: a mere game dislocated
   The radius of your wrist.

Love's wishbone, child, although I've gone
As men must and let you be drawn
   Off to appease another,
It may help that a Chinese play
Or Solomon himself might say
   I am your real mother.
4

      No one can tell you why
   the season will not wait;
      the night I told you I
must leave, you wept a fearful rate
         to stay up late.

      Now that it's turning Fan,
   we go to take our walk
      among municipal
flowers, to steal one off its stalk,
         to try and talk.

      We huff like windy giants
   scattering with our breath
      gray-headed dandelions;
Spring is the cold wind's aftermath.
         The poet saith.

      But the asters, too, are gray,
   ghost-gray. Last night's cold
      is sending on their way
petunias and dwarf marigold,
         hunched sick and old.

      Like nerves caught in a graph,
   the morning-glory vines
      frost has erased by half
still scrawl across their rigid twines.
         Like broken lines

      of verses I can't make.
   In its unraveling loom
      we find a flower to take,
with some late buds that might still bloom,
         back to your room.

      Night comes and the stiff dew.
   I'm told a friend's child cried
      because a cricket, who
had minstreled every night outside
         her window, died.
5

Winter again and it is snowing;
Although you are still three,
You are already growing
Strange to me.

You chatter about new playmates, sing
Strange songs; you do not know
Hey ding-a-ding-a-ding
Or where I go

Or when I sang for bedtime, Fox
Went out on a chilly night,
Before I went for walks
And did not write;

You never mind the squalls and storms
That are renewed long since;
Outside, the thick snow swarms
Into my prints

And swirls out by warehouses, sealed,
Dark cowbarns, huddled, still,
Beyond to the blank field,
The fox's hill

Where he backtracks and sees the paw,
Gnawed off, he cannot feel;
Conceded to the jaw
Of toothed, blue steel.
6

      Easter has come around
   again; the river is rising
      over the thawed ground
   and the banksides. When you come you bring
      an egg dyed lavender.
   We shout along our bank to hear
our voices returning from the hills to meet us.
   We need the landscape to repeat us.

      You Jived on this bank first.
   While nine months filled your term, we knew
      how your lungs, immersed
   in the womb, miraculously grew
      their useless folds till
   the fierce, cold air rushed in to fill
them out like bushes thick with leaves. You took your hour,
   caught breath, and cried with your full lung power.

      Over the stagnant bight
   we see the hungry bank swallow
      flaunting his free flight
   still; we sink in mud to follow
      the killdeer from the grass
   that hides her nest. That March there was
rain; the rivers rose; you could hear killdeers flying
   all night over the mudflats crying.

      You bring back how the red-
   winged blackbird shrieked, slapping frail wings,
      diving at my head—
   I saw where her tough nest, cradled, swings
      in tall reeds that must sway
   with the winds blowing every way.
If you recall much, you recall this place. You still
   live nearby—on the opposite hill.

      After the sharp windstorm
   of July Fourth, all that summer
      through the gentle, warm
   afternoons, we heard great chain saws chirr
      like iron locusts. Crews
   of roughneck boys swarmed to cut loose
branches wrenched in the shattering wind, to hack free
   all the torn limbs that could sap the tree.

      In the debris lay
   starlings, dead. Near the park's birdrun
      we surprised one day
   a proud, tan-spatted, buff-brown pigeon.
      In my hands she flapped so
   fearfully that I let her go.
Her keeper came. And we helped snarl her in a net.
   You bring things I'd as soon forget.

      You raise into my head
   a Fall night that I came once more
      to sit on your bed;
   sweat beads stood out on your arms and fore-
      head and you wheezed for breath,
   for help, like some child caught beneath
its comfortable wooly blankets, drowning there.
   Your lungs caught and would not take the air.

      Of all things, only we
   have power to choose that we should die;
      nothing else is free
   in this world to refuse it. Yet I,
      who say this, could not raise
   myself from bed how many days
to the thieving world. Child, I have another wife,
   another child. We try to choose our life.
7

Here in the scuffled dust
   is our ground of play.
I lift you on your swing and must
   shove you away,
see you return again,
   drive you off again, then

stand quiet till you come.
   You, though you climb
higher, farther from me, longer,
   will fall back to me stronger.
Bad penny, pendulum,
   you keep my constant time

to bob in blue July
   where fat goldfinches fly
over the glittering, fecund
   reach of our growing lands.
Once more now, this second,
   I hold you in my hands.
8

I thumped on you the best I could
      which was no use;
you would not tolerate your food
until the sweet, fresh milk was soured
      with lemon juice.

That puffed you up like a fine yeast.
   The first June in your yard
like some squat Nero at a feast
you sat and chewed on white, sweet clover.
      That is over.

When you were old enough to walk
      we went to feed
the rabbits in the park milkweed;
saw the paired monkeys, under lock,
   consume each other's salt.

Going home we watched the slow
stars follow us down Heaven's vault.
You said, let's catch one that comes low,
      pull off its skin
   and cook it for our dinner.

   As absentee bread-winner,
I seldom got you such cuisine;
we ate in local restaurants
or bought what lunches we could pack
      in a brown sack

with stale, dry bread to toss for ducks
   on the green-scummed lagoons,
crackers for porcupine and fox,
life-savers for the footpad coons
      to scour and rinse,

snatch after in their muddy pail
   and stare into their paws.
When I moved next door to the jail
      I learned to fry
omelettes and griddle cakes so I

could set you supper at my table.
As I built back from helplessness,
      when I grew able,
the only possible answer was
   you had to come here less.

This Hallowe'en you come one week.
      You masquerade
   as a vermilion, sleek,
fat, crosseyed fox in the parade
or, where grim jackolanterns leer,

go with your bag from door to door
foraging for treats. How queer:
   when you take off your mask
my neighbors must forget and ask
      whose child you are.

Of course you lose your appetite,
   whine and won't touch your plate;
      as local law
I set your place on an orange crate
in your own room for days. At night

you lie asleep there on the bed
      and grate your jaw.
Assuredly your father's crimes
      are visited
on you. You visit me sometimes.

The time's up. Now our pumpkin sees
   me bringing your suitcase.
      He holds his grin;
the forehead shrivels, sinking in.
You break this year's first crust of snow

off the runningboard to eat.
   We manage, though for days
I crave sweets when you leave and know
they rot my teeth. Indeed our sweet
      foods leave us cavities.
9

   I get numb and go in
though the dry ground will not hold
   the few dry swirls of snow
and it must not be very cold.
A friend asks how you've been
      and I don't know

   or see much right to ask.
Or what use it could be to know.
   In three months since you came
the leaves have fallen and the snow;
your pictures pinned above my desk
      seem much the same.

   Somehow I come to find
myself upstairs in the third floor
   museum's halls,
walking to kill my time once more
among the enduring and resigned
      stuffed animals,

   where, through a century's
caprice, displacement and
   known treachery between
its wars, they hear some old command
and in their peaceable kingdoms freeze
      to this still scene,

   Nature Morte. Here
by the door, its guardian,
   the patchwork dodo stands
where you and your stepsister ran
laughing and pointing. Here, last year,
      you pulled my hands

   and had your first, worst quarrel,
so toys were put up on your shelves.
   Here in the first glass cage
the little bobcats arch themselves,
still practicing their snarl
      of constant rage.

   The bison, here, immense,
shoves at his calf, brow to brow,
   and looks it in the eye
to see what is it thinking now.
I forced you to obedience;
      I don't know why.

   Still the lean lioness
beyond them, on her jutting ledge
   of shale and desert shrub,
stands watching always at the edge,
stands hard and tanned and envious
      above her cub;

   with horns locked in tan heather,
two great Olympian Elk stand bound,
   fixed in their lasting hate
till hunger brings them both to ground.
Whom equal weakness binds together
      none shall separate.

   Yet separate in the ocean
of broken ice, the white bear reels
   beyond the leathery groups
of scattered, drab Arctic seals
arrested here in violent motion
      like Napoleon's troops.

   Our states have stood so long
At war, shaken with hate and dread,
   they are paralyzed at bay;
once we were out of reach, we said,
we would grow reasonable and strong.
      Some other day.

   Like the cold men of Rome,
we have won costly fields to sow
   in salt, our only seed.
Nothing but injury will grow.
I write you only the bitter poems
      that you can't read.

   Onan who would not breed
a child to take his brother's bread
   and be his brother's birth,
rose up and left his lawful bed,
went out and spilled his seed
      in the cold earth.

   I stand by the unborn,
by putty-colored children curled
   in jars of alcohol,
that waken to no other world,
unchanging, where no eye shall mourn.
      I see the caul

   that wrapped a kitten, dead.
I see the branching, doubled throat
   of a two-headed foal;
I see the hydrocephalic goat;
here is the curled and swollen head,
      there, the burst skull;

   skin of a limbless calf;
a horse's foetus, mummified;
   mounted and joined forever,
the Siamese twin dogs that ride
belly to belly, half and half,
      that none shall sever.

   I walk among the growths,
by gangrenous tissue, goiter, cysts,
   by fistulas and cancers,
where the malignancy man loathes
is held suspended and persists.
      And I don't know the answers.

   The window's turning white.
The world moves like a diseased heart
   packed with ice and snow.
Three months now we have been apart
less than a mile. I cannot fight
      or let you go.
10

The vicious winter finally yields
   the green winter wheat;
the farmer, tired in the tired fields
   he dare not leave will eat.

Once more the runs come fresh; prevailing
   piglets, stout as jugs,
harry their old sow to the railing
   to ease her swollen dugs

and game colts trail the herded mares
   that circle the pasture courses;
our seasons bring us back once more
   like merry-go-round horses.

With crocus mouths, perennial hungers,
   into the park Spring comes;
we roast hot dogs on old coat hangers
   and feed the swan bread crumbs,

pay our respects to the peacocks, rabbits,
   and leathery Canada goose
who took, last Fall, our tame white habits
   and now will not turn loose.

In full regalia, the pheasant cocks
   march past their dubious hens;
the porcupine and the lean, red fox
   trot around bachelor pens

and the miniature painted train
   wails on its oval track:
you said, I'm going to Pennsylvania!
   and waved. And you've come back.

If I loved you, they said, I'd leave
   and find my own affairs.
Well, once again this April, we've
   come around to the bears;

punished and cared for, behind bars,
   the coons on bread and water
stretch thin black fingers after ours.
   And you are still my daughter.



She talks about how after reading W.D. Snodgrass' poem "Heart's Needle", she ran to her mother-in-law's house and brought her toddler home after nearly three years. Saying "That's what a poem should do - move people to action." (pg 77 Middlebrook) This led her to take action towards writing the autobiographical material she craved

Lowell on confessional poems

"All that gives light to those poems on agonising subjects is the craft." ( in middlebrook, 78)

The Curtain by Milan Kundera

In referencing Tolstoy, Kundera talks about how the novelist, like an architect was obliged to impose a form, composition was of utmost importance. "The beauty of the novel is inseparable from its architecture." (pg 154)

"What is left of a work of art once it's stripped of its form?" (154)

He talks about the "epistolary novel" and its possibilities
digressions
episodes
ruminations
ideas
memories

says that many are caught up in the "despotic authority of the story" (pg 166) Kundera is interested beyond that, in the moment, the digression.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Crossbred Genre


FIRE AND ICE

Today I have focussed intensely on selecting poems for a collaboration I am doing with a composer Yantra and another performer Kamahl. This performance is titled Fire and Ice and will premiere at the Byron Bay Writer's Festival in a few weeks.

My journey into this performance is as rambling as most of my creative undertakings. There is nothing linear or logical about it. I was hired to source some passion poetry for Kamahl and at that stage another performer through my experience working in poetry in performance. When the other performer for one reason or another was no longer in it, I was asked over a glass of wine if I would perform in it. Which, as I had not yet designed my t-shirt that says "NO to everything bc i am doing a DCA", I became part of this journey.

The theme for the festival is passion and we have sourced poems from far and wide to perform to music. I have chosen the following poems, that will be my 20-25 minute set of spoken word/performance to live music. Kamahl has his own set and then together we all perform a selection from The Prophet.

1)    Young Girl Wanda by Oodgeroo Noonuccal

2)    The Beauty of the Husband  by Anne Carson

3)    This Floating World  by Libby Hart

4)    Fever 103  by Sylvia Plath

5)    Macbeth  by William Shakespeare

6)    You Want me White by Alfonsina Storni

7)    I like your body by e. e. cummings

8)    Monkey’s Mask  by Dorothy Porter

9)    Gently by Yosano Akiko

 PASSION

The spark of excitement for this collaboration was the theme. Passion. Then an array of rolling factors, a festival director that was keen for performance, a closet lover of poetry in Kamahl, a composer who had wanted to work in Byron and with Kamahl and a need by the ensemble to connect with someone who knew poetry and could bring a female sensuality to the piece. There was also the key that this work was to be produced in a festival, an area where much of my work theatrically has taken place. Festivals are playgrounds for producers and those interested in blurring artistic boundaries. 

JOHN TRANTER, "DISTANT VOICES"

After reading John Tranter's excellent DCA (Distant Voice, 2009, UOW) last night and continuing to go deeper into it today I have questions to ask about how I can possibly write about my creative process without looking at the "theatre" that I have created. Tanter's exegesis talks about his influences over a rich, ground breaking career that spans decades. he references himself in the third person and his body of work enables him to do this. I am not at all at this stage in my career, nor is there a legacy such as his to talk of. In reading this DCA a few things became clear that i need to discuss with my supervisor.

QUESTIONS FOR SUPERVISOR

1. Do I need to use one overarching theoretical position, or can I look to Tranter's more biographical/literary influence model?

2. At what stage is it really possible to write "about" the creative project without pre-empting and shaping it?

3. Can I look at a structure  that in essence has three parts and focus on a "part" that for now maybe looks at influences such as Porter or Carson and my previous relationships to interpretation of their work.

4. How separate is Teresa Bell, as creator of CB, to the work that precedes and is happening around it? Is the purity of this project the core and the rest a distraction?

5. A constant within my creative work has been a strong need to combine forms and spaces. Is this not what I am doing in CB? And yet is there something in my very bower bird style of following the loose thread of an idea that I need to talk about and not be simply confined in this E to creative writing. Partic if part of the interest, as it is in Tranter's DCA anyway, is the creator and their process.

THE CROSSBREED

The chosen works of The Monkey's Mask and The Beauty of the Husband for the performance for Byron, and indeed the Award Winning adaptation I created with Gavin Blatchford of Libby Hart's song-line This Floating World are all examples of generic mixture of verse, novel and narrative. Porter call's her breakthrough verse novel a lesbian detective story, Carson has created  "a fictional essay in 29 tangos" and Hart a songline.

The need for stipulating that a novel must be made up of prose is slipping away fast as Catherine Addison points out in the conclusion of her summary on "The Verse Novel as Genre: Contradiction or Hybrid?" 

(Style: Vol 43, No 4, Winter 2009).

"So fast is this crossbred genre growing at the present time that it may soon become the norm to compose novels wholly or partially in verse."

Or as Libby Hart writes in the first poem in her  songline (Five Islands  Press, 2011)

"There is really only one ocean,

only one body of water.

No need for that human blather to label all things."

DREAM WORK

The obsession to label and group that is driven from theorists as well as marketing and funding channels for the arts often stifles the artistic in the creation process for one needs to define what they are producing before it is produced and i believe this is not the way many work, certainly not the way I work.

“It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin. That’s what I do when I am writing a novel, except somehow I’m simultaneously generating the wood as I’m carving it.”     (Paris Review Int pg 110)

William Gibson writes his book from the first sentence in an optimal state of a “lucid dream.”

 Dorothy Porter talks of the supernatural potency of channeling power of writing and how her “poetry knew more about me than I consciously knew about myself. It knew my secret self, its history and its likely future.”   (On Passion, p7)

I am aware that a lot of these musings sound like cop outs or distractions from finding a way of harnessing what it is I am wanting to say within the E. Dorothy Porter's long term partner and fellow writer talks about this need even within the creative work itself of getting over the "blackberries" in order to find the heart of what you want to say. In talking about Porter she says

"I think it is the way that most writers work, but then there were times that she went straight for the heart, and she would look in wonderment...I mean she would say, "Have I actually got this first time?" And sometimes she actually did....so full of the promise when the work is going so well but always the threat of you losing it. And I think a lot of artists actually feel this."

The poem that Goldsmith is referencing is Porter's Blackberries which ends

"I hold in my hand

the greedy, bleeding

pen

that has always

gorged itself."

SUMMARY; THE NEED FOR AN ANCHOR

Going back to my key reading for today, Tranter's DCA E, I am drawn towards the third part of his E, titled "Dream-Work" where Tranter outlined the three poets who have most influenced his work; Arthur Rimbaud, 'Ern Malley' and John Ashbery. I feel that this "part"of the E (as opposed to the other two, the first being on the Creative Project itself, the second on his 40 year career) is the one I feel like investigating in my own E. At this stage I have identified a key influences that I wish to examine Dorothy Porter, the connections in my working life to her as a person, a teacher and as Tranter outlines about Ashbery for him at this start of his "Distant Voices", an anchor.



Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Introduction


This blog will be a reflection on my creative process whilst doing a Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA) at Wollongong University under the supervision of Dr Joshua Lobb. It will be notes, thoughts and sometimes unedited, rushed whimsy but I will try to move towards a more structured, solid thesis along the way.

The DCA has a creative component as well as a research component that asks for an academic paper of approx. 30,000 words that takes into account your process within the creation of the partner work. For the creative work I am writing a 'novel' with a working title "Cloudberries" (CB) that includes both poetry and prose. The novel's protagonist Isabella finds herself part of a ghostly matrix of women who have been held in confinement in psychiatric hospitals after experiencing a breakdown. She remains connected to the outside world through her love for a young girl held in a detention centre in Australia. CB aims to be part ghost story, part psychological, political thriller, part love story and part fictive memoir.

The above picture of Austinmer sea pool is indicative to me of the witchy brew I need to analyse and dive into in order to make sense of a process that for want of a better word is witchcraft. A place of magic, fire, blood, sweat, tears, insecurity, failure, tangent, death, colour, duende and of course water. 

In the research component or Exegesis (E) will of course be an analysis of CB and the process of its creation BUT it will also seek to be an analysis of the creative process itself for writers. In particular in reference to the work of Dorothy Porter and the links to my own process.

In particular I am interested in the spark of interest, meditation, the obsession for a topic that leads to its exploration for an artist such as Porter and in turn myself. It's links to the direct experience of the writer, the struggle to find the correct form and voice for this subject. The darkness that seeks the light of the page. The need for a physical and rythmic connection with words that drives Porter's staccato, blues and soul-kicking themes and her obsessive reading. To my need to come at an experience through words, images and communicate it through words. 

The works of Porter seem volatile and free to me, the white space and jumping narrators allow for hard hitting punches. It is the physical connection with words and images that I am interested in exploring . In my first blog post I wish to merely summarise my project, my connections with Porter and then to look at todays reading which focused on my supervisor's PhD thesis. Part of the E requires I define a theoretical stance, which is the part that I keep shaking off. I feel it almost goes against the very essence of creation to confine it through a lens however I have enjoyed very much Joshua Lobb's narratological approach in his thesis and it has started me thinking about the unconcious way I have created unstable narration in CB to date. 

In his work "Laminations: The 'Self-Conscious" Realist Techniques of A.S. Byatt" (2004) he examines the way Byatt destabalises the conventional realist time frame and "replaces them with the democracy of laminated time." He also talks about shattering the "now" point through using characters as narrators and recounting moments from various temporal locations, in particular in reference to Byatt's The Babel Tower.  (pg 231)

A further destabalisation of the realist novel comes from Byatt's use of present tense, not just a "fictive present" but a "real present", or one Lobb outlines that "does not depend on the illusion of "presentness", but asserts an instantaneous unfolding of the narrative." He talks about the worry of random moments without a reliable heirachy of time or narrator meaning a text can become unreadable.

To be reading theory about laminated texts and the danger of them being unreadable whilst you are writing one is in itself a lamination. I have often rejected the linear impulse of drama and action, I find it compelling in its directness but have always allowed that it is what is in the tangents that we see outside the arrow of time that give us the ghosts, the whispers and the deeper subconcious connections with the experience of an artwork. Lobb's defense of this chaotic, layered narration is that it allows for events to connect with other's throughout time, like other universes or past lives connecting on different planes. 

It is this structure and thematic concept that I have chosen, subconciously to depict the unstable mind of my protagonist in my work CB. Also to allow for the possibility of a physical space, such as that of a psychiatric hospital, or a detention centre, or a book's plot to be a portal for time travel, the walls to be keepers of stories, the horror of confinement to leave ghosts.  Regardless of my background in poetry or my gender I have long been attracted to novels that reject the one coherent narrative and narrative arc. In the same way as the psychiatrist in CB rejects Bella's self-diagnosis of "nervous breakdown" as something that is a literary creation that defies, like most psychological illness a neat, singular reading. As much as we crave the lure of cohesion, sanity, structure and communion our modern world is not providing a model of that and therefore our art cannot reflect it if it is to engage us outside of a fleeting moment of beauty. 

I believe that any creative process that is addictive, and by that I mean essential to the creator for their ability to make sense of the world, rather than a hobby or past time they enjoy as relaxation, there needs to be an element of themselves within the work. The obsessions, loves, losses, or indeed the very things we are missing and longing for in our own life. 

I believe that in most work that I relate to, or that I wish to create or expand on from one form to another there is an essential key, often within the protagonist that links me to it from the soul; or the ecstatic unknowable.

"In a good novel, a great novel, descriptions of the landscape, various objects, embedded tales, slight digressions - everything makes us feel the moods, habits and the character of the protagonists. Let us imagine a novel as a sea made up of these irreducible nerve endings-these moments - the units that inspire the writer - and let us never forget that every point contains a bit of the protagonist's soul."  
(Pamuk, O. the naive and the sentimental novelist)