my ~artistic process~

[kaberett]

19:53 < kaberett> happy to listen
19:54 < kaberett> I'm leaning more towards "biting" than "providing active
                  listening to help you work thing sout"
19:54 < kaberett> as a heads-up
19:54 < kaberett> because um
19:54 < kaberett> http://kaberett.dreamwidth.org/158899.html
19:54 < kaberett> ^ that is what anxiety feels like
19:54 < kaberett> I am still mostly coherent, but I am tensed and hunched and
                  my pulse is elevated and I am feeling choked and adrenaline-y
19:54  * Woggy nods
19:56 < Woggy> (That poem ;_;)
19:56 < kaberett> hah <3
19:56 < kaberett> combination of 3 or 4 nights' insomnia
19:57 < kaberett> (poems tend to come to me that way)
20:00 < Woggy> It is beauty and truth and love and feels given form and shape
               and on the paper and...yes.
20:00 < kaberett> there was a sonnet I tried writing months ago, about the body
20:00 < kaberett> and the body as poetry
20:00 < kaberett> comparing the cage of our ribs to the constraints of the
                  sonnet form
20:01 < kaberett> so that's where I pulled that particular metaphor from, and
                  maybe one day the sonnet will get written
20:01 < kaberett> (I am having Many Thoughts about legibility and the body as
                  story and skin as canvas)
20:01  * Woggy quiet nods
20:02 < Woggy> (For all i'm somewhat mrh about certain aspects of my body, the
               fact that it's _mine_, with the attendant history, is
               an...important physical anchor.
20:05 < kaberett> and I poem I was probably unconsciously drawing on while
                  writing that is this one:
                  http://www.fulgura.de/sonett/karussel/original/prayer.htm
20:05 < kaberett> the "radio's prayer" at the end is the Shipping Forecast,
                  which is a BBC Institution and generally regarded as very
                  soothing
20:06 < kaberett> and part of the reason that I associate it with my poem, in
                  spite of it not actually containing any real talk about
                  bodies, is because of her other work, and how much of it
                  _does_ contain bodies
20:06 < kaberett> the woman whose skin becomes a flawless map of her hometown,
                  for example
20:06 < kaberett> and also this one, which speaks about the emptiness and
                  interstices:
http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/carol_ann_duffy/poems/8118
20:06 < kaberett> WHICH IS BASICALLY I have a ramble about my poetic
                  influences, and feel free to not engage with any of it ;)
20:08 < kaberett> (and then it spins off into how much I feel that Words, Wide
                  Night is - or can be - the same kind of love-song to self
                  that is Derek Walcott's Love After Love...)

-- which -- self-referentially? recursively? -- brought back to mind the book I am currently reading, Ursula LeGuin's Changing Planes (content notes: SO RACIST seriously do not bother with it it took me about 15 pages to get to the point where the only reason I am finishing it up is completionism), in which there is discussed a plane/dimension/world in which language consists of around 5000 syllables that can be strung together, where the meaning of each syllable is determined almost entirely by its context -- the syllables present before and after, to great extent. The writing system is described as non-linear -- starting from a central syllable or idea and growing outwards in organic or artistic patterns, such that by the time the piece is completed the original central point may no longer be of particular importance. So -- this I thought of, of course, because of the discussion above about constellations and reinterpretation of meaning...

Comments

[birke]

Ursula LeGuin's Changing Planes (content notes: SO RACIST seriously do not bother with it it took me about 15 pages to get to the point where the only reason I am finishing it up is completionism)

Oh, wow, really? I read Changing Planes several years ago, and either I didn't notice the racism or I've forgotten it since then.

"Prayer," on the other hand, is one of my favorite poems.

[kaberett]

Mmm, it was really uncomfortably exoticising? And most of the places on other planes had people who were described as Not White, with decidedly non-Western names, largely at a lower level of technology than "our plane". Plus it was all about tourism to other places, but visits to "our plane" were completely glossed over apart from an Exceptional Native. I mean, there was a bit of discussion of colonialism and exploitation, and there was the person who invented the technique from "our plane" who had an Indian-coded name, but um the whole effect left me a bit uncomfortable, really.