16 :: compiler of environments ::
[posted 2/26/01]
The computer has completed its array of warm-up exercises, and Fletcher has prepared a fresh pot of coffee. He sits at the desk. Papers, books, mail, and a few sections of yesterday's Tribune fill the space between the desk's edge and the monitor; he plows some of this printmatter back with his hand, clearing a small triangle of desk space for his steaming mug. Once that's settled, he pulls the mouse out of the sprawl, orients his hand to the position of the pointer on the monitor, and moves to the Word icon and clicks.
While Word's loading, he reaches down to retrieve the keyboard. Pulls it up into his lap. (When not in use it lives under the desk, umbilicaled to the tall column of the CPU, which also lives under there. It hardly ever needs to be seen, so he keeps it down there in dark footspace rather than giving up any more of the desktop's valuable visual area.)
He goes into the File menu and pulls up a poem that he's been working on, entitled “The Sphere of Practical Operation.” His MFA program required him to turn in a manuscript as his thesis. He did — a short collection called Focused Attention —but when he got close to the the manuscript submission deadline approached he'd written some poems hastily and included others that he had come to think of as early work, written before he'd really developed ideas about what a poem is and what it does. In those closing days he often remarked on the irony of a two-year program — you're required to let your poems demonstrate what you've learned in the program at the exact moment that you've finally learned that all those poems are the unformed efforts of a novice.
While in the program, he'd imagined that he would submit his manuscript to the battery of first book contests, but now he knows that it needs more work, a good dose of focused attention, ha ha. He's currently filling in his theoretical blind spots in this Ph.D. program (they've got him reading Kristeva and Barthes right now) and he enjoys thinking about that stuff, finds it helpful and interesting, at its best he thinks it achieves its own kind of poetry — but he hasn't been working much on his own writing. Sometimes, when he looks the matter straight in its face, he has to wonder whether he's given it up. The idea always pangs him, sends him back to the computer. “Sphere” is the first new poem he's worked on in three or four months. (Appalling.)
He looks at the page on the screen. It looks like a night sky of language: he tries to separate each word or phrase from the others with as much blank space as possible. (He read a lot of Zen poetry in his MFA program, looked at a lot of Japanese art.) He uses Word's Columns function to break the page into three areas and adds bits to all three, more or less simultaneously, sometimes below what he's previously written, sometimes above. He has given up on the idea that a poem should be read from beginning to end: he wants his poems to function as fields of information rather than a linear progression of information; he wants people to begin looking at them wherever a detail catches their eye, as one would look at a painting. He has a Rothko print tacked up above his desk. And, taped up next to it, a John Ashbery quote written on an index card: “I think I consider the poem as a sort of environment, and one is not obliged to take notice of every aspect of one's environment — one can't, in fact.”
He needs words for the field. He looks at the headline on the Tribune. Drug war nets smaller fish in city. Drug war nets? People who don't like poetry don't like it because it's not efficient; it doesn't release all of its information at once. Sometimes he wonders if any language does. He begins to type.
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