Saturday 5 January 2013

Desultory Speculationism

"At one level the poem-as-notebook seeks to establish some kind of authenticity and immediacy. The poem becomes the record of its own growth, form replicating the sudden shifts of attention in a desultory speculation. But at a more complex level such emphasis on the process rather than the product of writing dissolves boundaries between literature as artifact and literature as daily record... The notebook, rather than being the source for materials used retrospectively, is the activity of and for that day. Writing and living are so closely united that incidents like shopping or doing the wash merge imperceptibly with the act of writing about them."

(Michael Davidson, 'Palimtexts', in Postmodern Genres, ed. Marjorie Perloff, 90)

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