Wednesday, February 07, 2007

I'm reading Under Albany by Ron Silliman. which I am enjoying. more normative than I expected, but that's okay. I also figured it should be 9000 pages, but maybe it is part 1 in a 17 million piece expansion on everything Silliman ever wrote, due out in January 2723. I mean, he's a dogged writer, for one thing, and isn't the idea of The Project part of the zeitgeist? not to be flippant. Tom Raworth's A Serial Biography came to mind, not so much for approach but for scatter of memories. of course Hejinian's My Life, Dahlen's A Reading. lengthy list, really, and for good reason. keying the artist in the work. I differentiate these works, which I'll call memoir, from autobiography. autobiography, as I define, is more linear and narrative in approach. which can be good but I think less valuable than the memoir approach. I cannot think offhand of a poet autobiography of any resonance, tho probably some will strike me later, or you could refresh my dotty memory. I see memoir as processual, or, the process part is what intrigues me. you think of Proust and his Wayback Machine and do you remember the dress you wore 25 years ago?. memoir is in all of us, writers or not. usefully in us. you have to get beyond the idea both of importance and unimportance. these skewed assertions of facts, dancing in palimpsest, have vital essence and smack. UA shows the same detailed advance as Silliman's blog. I could see taking all the personal notes on his blog, about himself, and the positioning within his world, and make of them a furtherance of this book. his blog is a curious blend of critical and personal, where his critical becomes perhaps too personally regulatory, while the personal is oddly free. I mean, I like that blend, but in a way, I could see the two urges separated as well. UA being an example of that separation. I think...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Under Albany is fine just the way it is. It is Universe that will be the long work, 360 poems mostly around the 50-100 page mark each.

Simple Theories said...

and I'll bet the sequel to that will be pretty long too. I look forward.