03.23.09 Renee Gladman

In class tonight Renee Gladman poet and fiction writer came to talk to our class about her writing process. The discussion at the beginning was heady and abstract...needless to say I LOVED IT. I was furiously jotting down notes trying to keep up with the kind of discourse she was putting out. Some of it definitely went over my head...and I'm not going to try to pretend that I get it all yet...cause really she's in another league when discussing her thought process. She reminded me a little of Akilah Oliver because of the way in which she communicated some of these ideas. I want to write them down here to help unravel some of the entwined thoughts.

Renee talked about a relationship to language and how she has become more conscious of the potentiality of the moment of writing ....(my handwriting looks like chicken scratch...can't quite make out the rest of that sentence. ...) let me try this in a different way...

how in the impulse to write the thought there are infinite ways in which to convey/communicate the experience. But language...the translation of those thoughts onto the page turns into something narrow. We write in categories...in linear/logical ways while our thought patterns are more expansive than that.

Establishing a philosophy of time and experience.
The logic of the grammar tells you what to expect.
The logic of the content that can be in opposition.
The logic of the problem which can be ambiguous.
How can you get these three conditions to occupy the same space at the same time.

Can you gather the experience in the breadth of a sentence?
Conceptual way of thinking about narrative.

She creates a condition in the logical flow of the sentence is breaking down on the level of the content.

Prose as a place of experimental narrative
She is conscious of language and sound.

Brings you back to experiences
How do you grasp the experience and make it coherent.
What experiences are accumulated?

She enjoyed Henry James because he circles vague spaces.
He would write about things happening but difficult to pinpoint.

Present tense captures the ongoing-ness of being in the moment
and in the acting.

Being enacted as the narrative is unfolding.

What does prose breach that poetry does not?
Poetry as a genre is not interested in character or turth or lies...
that's not part of the discourse in poetry.

Fiction to be better needs to be more complicated.
The language has to be....

She likes translations of European fiction writers
because of the awkwardness and formality of the language.
Feels the writer interpret and re-envision
sound of translation

White space on the page is a way of framing the language
Part of the conception

Her narrators in her work tend to be slightly confused and on the periphery.
They embody that state of irresolution.

We went back to talking about how language narrows the experience.
You can only write one thing at a time...
However, if we were able to write 8 things at the same time this would approximate what the actual experience is truly like.

How do you translate the many things into one thing?
What does the order in which you tell it... tell you about the experience?

There is a lot more but this was at the core of what I wanted to record on this blog.
Because in these fragments of ideas that I was able to scavenge...something...clicked.
Something about this information gave me an A-HA moment about writing.
It hasn't quite sunk in yet....or it hasn't quite taken root...but.....



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