#c.d. wright

Something always happens: draw nearer n never fear: the world spins nightly toward its brightness and we are on it.

I recall Angela Carter saying that when a student asked her a pointed question about dialogue, she said, she had never been adept at dialogue, so she avoided it whenever possible. Dialogue being fundamental to writing fiction, and lineation being fundamental to writing poetry, I felt a considerable amount of relief in her response. I have never been confident in my sense of lineation, conditioned as I was to more or less end-stopping. But with the computer, lineation could be tried out every which way without the physical labour of re-typing; so I began to work more with the eye, the visual field, and to come to some understanding of language against space. I learned to enjamb, of course, but I do not find that a reliably effective device. It’s a conspicuous manoeuvre with an obvious result. I found the caesura more attractive as it directed both eye and breath. I prefer cadence to measure, but I have not fully developed its possibilities. Prose is more inclusive. I just don’t always want to leave so much out. In composing a long work, prose and poetry activate one another, take a cue from the other. A paradigm to which I aspire, unpunctuated, ineludible folding of line after line, cadence risen from the ground up is still beyond my reach. If I got there, I’d probably stick with it. Until then I herk and jerk my way through. I nevertheless consider it fortifying what Angela said in passing, as I knew it necessitated a great deal of artful negotiation to successfully avoid a staple of the art.