Reflection

In an effort to achieve a degree of impersonality in my poems, that is to veer away from fixed or stale ideas, lexicons, emotions, etc, I started playing around with different approaches, some influenced by the early work of John Ashbery, particularly The Tennis Court Oath. Through John Ashbery I was introduced to Raymond Roussel, who used a radically impersonal and random approach to constructing his bizarre texts (Locus Solus for eg.). To a lesser extent, Peter Gizzi’s recent book Archeophonics—which jazzily stretches and pushes the limits of diction and syntax—resonated with me. I enjoyed its strange but familiar music. I started using a process whereby I isolated random passages from Classical literature (i.e. primarily Graeco-Roman texts, for instance from Virgil, or from more contemporary but adjacent works—like the poems of Giacomo Leopardi). Upon isolating workable passages, I would then cleanse them of all superfluous words, like articles, conjunctions, participles and so on, retaining only the concrete nouns and a few active verbs. Then I would scramble the remaining chunk of words and from that remnant attempt to stitch and smooth and force together some semblance of a poem, with a distinct if odd sound pattern.