Through poetry, Living Methods writers created “porous” maps of the Kinney Center as a physical and textual site: not just a place-to-write, but a place formed and reformed by writing. Each writer documented their ongoing relationship with a location of their choosing on the Center’s grounds, a place they felt drawn to investigate through poetry.
Lila Blaustein
Statement
I seemed to write only about myself. Weeks, or maybe months, ago, my co-worker told me he doesn’t like contemporary poetry because it is too concerned with the “I.” I haven’t stopped thinking about it and I haven’t stopped saying “I” despite my half-hearted efforts. In the class I found a stone bench to sit on and a tree to lie under. They were often spaces of clarity, clarity always dragging back to the “I.” Or they were spaces of watching, watching the tree and thinking thoughts that were not words. Watching the mountains and hearing myself breathe and then turning to the page to write about alcohol and politics and kissing and traffic. I wrote once about the bench, it goes as follows, “Stone bench / of my exhaustion.” I wrote a couple times about the tree, it appears once in my contribution. I laid below it and received rest from its shade of rustling. Sometimes I needed the rest more than I needed the poetry. One often gave way to the other. I could not write about the leaves. I wanted to try but there was nothing there.
I was drawn most to the images in the books. This is how it is at my job too – I work in a bookstore but mostly look for pictures. I’ve been thinking about visual culture lately and how we’re addicted to all the things we can see. I feel myself ruled by image and equating image with entirety. I wrote about visual culture in my final contribution.
Liz showed me a few books with beautiful full page illustrations. I took pictures of angels and wrote out sentences and pieces of language that stuck out to me. I copied down a quote from Thomas Brown’s Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenets and Commonly Presumed Truths from 1658:
“We must observe circles: that while we are daily carried about, and whirled on by the swing and rapt of the one, we may maintain a natural and proper course, in the flow and sober wheel of the other.”
Something that was pointed out to me in the workshop on the second week, was that the narrator of my poems was often expressing a dissonance between the self and the world around them. This was especially present in my poem that begins “For example at my aunts party.” After hearing that, I started noticing it in other things that I had written and was in the process of writing. I see it in this quote too – the outside world and the self – they switch between being the swing and rapt and the flow and sober wheel. We move between circles, balancing, spinning.
I found another quote in a dedication that I would like to end with. The dedication is in John Harington’s Orlando Furiouso from 1634, it says, “I presume to offer to you highness this first part of the fruit of the little garden of my slender skill.”