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Stephen Ratcliffe's most recent
books are Portraits & Repetition (The
Post-Apollo Press) and SOUND/(system) (Green Integer). Listening to
Reading, a collection of essays on contemporary poetry and poetics, was
published by SUNY Press in 2000. He is publisher of Avenue B and directs
the Creative Writing program at Mills College in Oakland.
Question #1: In DR #2 Johannes Göransson makes the
observation regarding Russell Edson that, “Sometimes, when
I’ve read his poems I start to write like him too. It’s
infectious.” Whose poems get under your skin in this way?
Whose poems should get under more people’s skin? Also,
how does the pp/ff form contribute to or enable what Göransson
calls ‘infectious’?
I've been reading Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals lately,
for a course I'm teaching in English Romantic Poetry, and it occurs
to me now that they're models of a kind of writing that might be
called prose poem (but isn't, since it's called journal) and also
a model of something I'm doing in REAL, in that she's trying to
write down 'what happened' in any given day, sometimes quite 'matter
of factly' ("I worked in the garden in the morning. Wm prepared
Pea sticks. Threatening for rain but yet it comes not.") sometimes
'confessional' ("I had the tooth-ach in the night -- took
Laudanum."), sometimes remarkably observant in its 'description'
of nature ("showery night the lake still in the morning --
in the afternoon flashing light from the beams of the sun, as it
was rufled by the wind."). She has no apparent 'literary ambition'
(she begins journal on the day her beloved brother William leaves
on a 3 week walking tour with brother John, because" I shall
give WM Pleasure by it when he comes home again"), doesn't
try to 'shape' the writing beyond what it is as record of things,
and as 'record' (also) an enactment in words (a WORD ENACTMENT)
of those things as she has seen/noted them, which seeing/noting
seems to give them a certain 'value,' as such, AS THINGS: "A
beautiful yellow, palish yellow flower, that looked thick round & double, & smelt
very sweet -- I supposed it was a ranunculus -- Crowfoot, the grassy-leaved
Rabbit-toothed white flower, strawberries, Geranium -- scentless
violet, anemones two kinds, orchises, primroses. The heckberry
very beautiful as a low shrub. The crab coming out. Met a blind
man driving a very large beautiful Bull & a cow -- he walked
with two sticks." And so it goes on -- not 'shaped' and not
a 'poem' (or 'prose poem'!) but writing itself, writing that transcribes
actual things/actions/events in the world as they were, or seemed
to be in that present moment of seeing/noting them. The writing
in REAL tries to do something of this 'translation' of world into
words, not as Dorothy Wordsworth did (whatever she did!) because
I'm trying to give a 'shape' to things (the lines) on the page
(among other things), but I'm interested to
think of her work at this point, having written REAL.
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