I Want Something Other Than Time

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A Letter on the Writing of “I Want Something Other Than Time”

Dear Alienocene Reader,

The poems in “I Want Something Other Than Time,” a few of which accompany this note, imagine their own arcing lines as a form for writing our disappearance into the surface of the page actively into the page itself as it’s being written. They imagine themselves to make manifest the interiority with which we animate the surface of inscription (not to exclude their projection within the interiority of this screen now-ish to you).

During the last year in which they were being written, i began to realize that prior to this writing i had the habit of positioning the notebook or book in writing (and in reading) at a thirty-five to sixty-five degree angle and wrapping my body around it. It was as though i were dramatizing my disappearance into the interiority of the page by positioning the page within an orbit of my body, perhaps hastening an entrance. Oddly, as I Want Something Other Than Time was being written in rising arcs across its pages, i found i was positioning the notebook directly in front of me, writing in a perpendicularity, transferring a drama of the interiority of the page from my body’s relation to the page to an alternate drama whose movement could be artificed as active in the material traces of the inscription itself.

An additionally odd (at least for me) result of this compositional method has been that the poems seem to write a relatively stable self-referential first-person in their syntaxes, an event quite wholly uncommon (and not overly desirable) within my experiences of poetic composition. It would be silly to theorize that phenomenon fully (or i don’t know how to as i write this), why my drama of the emergence of a subject in the technology of inscription appears somehow less protean, more unified, when i physically exteriorize the drama of the surface’s interiority. It’s somehow surprising to me (though i intuit it’s perhaps obvious to you?), and i suspect that this dynamic is not uninvolved with why i seem to repeat so frequently my desire for some thing that is alterior or exterior to my experiences of time. If you feel like helping me understand, please feel invited to write to me at lewis. freedman@gmail. com.

I hope your day today is a good day,

Lewis

 

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