WE7

Chih-Chung Tsai

LTWR113: Rivera-Garza

WE:3

WE7: High Fidelity

In the past 13 years, the entire field of writing has both broadened and deepened socially, mostly for the better.

The other part of this primary decision was that the idea of writing a single poem that was somehow “the same” over such a long period of time seemed intensely problematic to me – the question of boredom’s no abstraction.

Having said that, one section, “Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect,” has taken me years to complete and it’s nowhere near done at the moment. That section in fact has become – I don’t think I intended it as such – the secret spine of The Alphabet as a whole.

That logic is ultimately intuitive. I seem to know where a given section is going to be headed sometimes years in advance, but very little about what it will look like when it gets there. I’ve been thinking about a poem – sometimes this thinking is little more than a sense of shape upon the page or vocabulary or tone, the sort of thing that comes to you when you first wake in the morning even before you remember your name, very amorphous.

In San Francisco in the 1970s, one could go inexpensively to the SF Art Institute and see independent film that was, in fact, just that – Bruce Connors, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Michael Snow. Kathy Acker, whom I first met in 1972 or ’73, was a walking encyclopedia of every avant-garde movement possible

I’m not a very mathematical person, or at least I don’t think of myself as one. In my day job, I struggle with some of the basic formulae used to calculate a firm’s net present value, for example, that sort of thing. I barely got through math in high school and took only one course in college (largely just to prove to myself that I could do it).

Still, one of my eight-year-old sons wrote me a note the other day that was simply a schematic of Pascal’s triangle – so that must come from somewhere.

            Having grown up without a father, I was extraordinarily hesitant about dealing with older male writers, so generally stayed at arm’s length.

When I had finished Crow in 1970, I knew that it would be the only book that looked even somewhat like the poetry I’d grown up with during the previous decade. But I struggled with what my work needed to become for years.

Themes are always a consideration, though just one of many. What, in this sense, is a theme?

I consider what I write to be prose poems but not fiction, partly for formal reasons and partly because I'm not interested in "making things up."

Literature needs audiences, but not a "public."

Disputes as to the "excellence" of one kind of writing or another are in fact sub rosa arguments as to which social group will dominate the other.

And there is no such thing as naturalism in literature. It, too, is simply an affected style. At the same time, there is no such thing as "simple individuals."

My poetic forms are addressed to very specific people who are more easily addressed in those forms. In