and this is where this project is beginning. i would be writing against the normalising or “cleaning up” of experience that usually goes on during poem-making, and allowing instead for the inscription of lived experience upon the text, for material reality to make incursions and disruptions, for something more intimate.Īnd so i decided: private letters, to any possible number of “gentle readers”. i began to wonder if by creating a book, less of epistolary poetry as it’s commonly understood within the context of publication, but of letters that function as poems within very intimate contexts, and very private spaces and relations, would this change and shape the process and the type of poetry being written. writing for a readership, in order to be read, is writing not to express or embody trauma, but to render it acceptable, intelligible, accessible it is to curtail and to clean up experience.Īnd i became obsessed by this, with the idea that books are like derrida’s postcards, these infinitely accessible / accessed, mediated artefacts that the action of opening a book, and that of opening a letter have these radically different symbolic weights, these different frictions between disclosure and restraint. inhibited first because all language is a compromise with lived experience, and inhibited secondly because the act of producing poems, of “being a poet” situated within prize and publication culture is a form of mediation. i want to write this way, but i found when I sat down to start, i was inhibited. I want to produce work that embodies the collapse of linear understanding that occurs during and following trauma, provoking what literary theorist shoshana felman has described as a “disintegration of narrative”.
my research will explore the idea that the epistolary form is one way in which this process takes place. assimilated, integrated, and transformed into some kind of narrative language. her work examines strategies by which trauma may be “told”, i.e. her analysis argues for a literature of trauma that communicates in indirect and unexpected ways. My work is mainly concerned with what cathy caruth defines as “impossible saying”, the narration of trauma. i’ve spent my summer reading around this subject, trying to find a way into it, a critical framework for intuitive approaches i haven’t yet learnt to articulate. In october 2016 i’m starting a practice based ph.d at birkbeck on the relationship between the epistolary form in contemporary poetry and the use of letters in therapeutic contexts. what? the eye, inflicted frontier, forced to see against its will.
a poem isn’t shared, a poem’s only ever stolen. i have been saying over and over: this isn’tįor you. i have given you this weĬonsummate a censorship. so what does this poem amount to? gentle reader,ĭotter of my every eavesdropped i. Now: to each action its own particular weight to each object its own “…a book might be opened, a letter’s only ever broken into.
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