Avatars of the Studio

In the Studio

ONCE I LIVED IN RURAL novel YORK IN A farmhouse built in 1842 with sum of two units Franklin stoves for heat. That's where Milt Kessler bent holdered me up with Whitman. The "office" was upstairs-a drawn out drafty room with wood-slat floors and cover gables for walls and a window that gazeed out over a pasture, a garden, and thickets It's like the house in Camden, Milt said, the floors overspreaded with letters and books and month and month of newspapers and notes. My word processor was up there with us, a marvel of technology that consisted of a daisywheel typewriter with probably 64 MB of memory and a green-screen monitor; it printed a page by minute. It reproduced uneventful unrestrained verse. For five months of the year, the piece of poetrys tended to be about plants. The other seven month theory crept in.

Upstairs, I lay down a lengthy white sheet of butcher paper. I tore Whitman's work leaf by leaf apart, wrote it all back down, sprawled across the sheet, thirty feet of coverts by three feet of hollers

"What do you think about that, elderly man?"

"I guess it must be the flag of my disposition. Or I gues it is a uniform hieroglyphic."

"Don't keep busy me with that righteous smack."

We make revolveed around the floor for three month Sometimes I simply wrote a leaf of grass by the agency of hand, sometimes I glued a metrical composition letter by letter in a vortex or in lines or a single file down the sheet as lengthy as it would last. single slash of green acrylic across the middle.

Ignatow said it was all a lump of bunk, you know. "Where is it, this paradise of equality?" Neruda said, "After Whitman, on what account bother to write poems?" on the other hand he bothered. And there was strike and all of the others who kept up the dialogue. Pacts Whitmana. We talk to the dead, on the other hand we have to write past them, around them. They don't understand us. Upstairs, the voices began to consolidate around the sheet. Walt direct the eyeed around, wild-eyed. I set up the voices in their hold little houses inside shoe boxe and place the lot of them in a quiet retiring-room where they could stew in their be in possession of space, outside time.

Two Flags for Milt: the Thirty-Foot Whitman, a Litany of Children in the studio.

For the scholar of writing in the U s Ambition is tied to whether single writes for one's contemporaries or for race who are either already dead or not notwithstanding born. The proponents of high Ambition are writing for the dead, for their be in possession of deaths. For those who are easy in mind with the endlessness of this world, the voice attenuates from all the surrounding frequencies, each spark that comes down the line, each mouth that speaks and sings and unhurts And it's all immediately available-in The material part Electronic Studio.

When AOL was invented, pop the Internet leapt up from the computer lab and into what we chat about when we chat about writing. on a sudden identity became a parlor game. unexpectedly the TV had a sibling. abruptly desire was less because distance was les and desire was greater the further you were from the terminal. with equal reason you carried the terminal with you and replaced the ache for the Nothing That Isn't with the ache for the Nothing That Is conjoined If Google is finite, then with equal reason is the universe. And in the way that are the voices you transcribe from without of the Nothing in the studio.

The bard who writes for the dead strike one as beings to feel the need to be recognized. by the agency of whom? "Having found a self . / in himself he likes or would like to like,"1 he supports it up with a extremity goes over the eyes with a marker occasionally for a like reason they stand out, stuffs in a little straw.

The bard who writes for the dead is trying not to die. His studio is a hospice.

"The way / is to let the voice find itself / assimilated from the many tones and sources, its / predominant and subsidiary motions / not chop away from the gatherings."

Poet who work outside academia and don't expend large amounts of time in a private office direct the eye for ways to transcend the studio. Many of us work in technology. We write when we can, where we can. each desk, every scrap of paper, each chance to power up is an avatar of the studio. As with unwired author of poemss and their love of their composes or their portable typewriters, each open terminal manifests another episode of the single long writing.

There is no studio.

At LinguaMOO (lingua.utdallas.edu) I one time had a virtual office. Like the office in my abode it is an artificial space that unrolls organically. There's nothing to see-it has no visual existence, not smooth a Photoshopped fake. I visit it occasionally. It consists sole of some memory on a server a scarcely any sentences of description about works a desk, chairs, some coffee Someone has dropp a virtual work there. There are transcripts there of discussions I had years ago with pupils But when I visit it, it's for the most part filled with the absence of anyone else

But I know its walls are carved with potential combinations of electron the way the walls of Neruda's abiding-place in Chile are covered with names. There is Walt's sheet. The wires in the walls are conjoined to the wires in the walls of houses in Japan, in Nigeria, in Israel, in Sweden. When I am in it, I am everywhere. Tigers in r weather.2