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.

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)