Writing

I wrote some poetry last night, though I haven’t yet decided whether it’s any good. Like the poetry I wrote a few days ago, it’s more lyrical, but there’s still a fragmentation, or rather, words seem to sort themselves into multiple columns. As in OFC there are still “nodes,” but there are more nodes and less “shards and splinters,” in that there is no atomic fragmentation (down to bare letters… the word is now again the atomic unit). Though you can tell that it’s my poetry and that it’s an outgrowth of the reader/response issues I dealt with in OFC, it’s also quite different (to my eyes/ears anyway).

What the columns most immediately remind me of is the system of note-taking that I was taught in AP European History. Our teacher told us to divide the page so that we took notes in the major 2/3 while preserving 1/3 for marginalia and additional commentary, in case she forgot to tell us something during the lecture and wanted to go back and stick something in. This system of notetaking was never very effective for me, as my notes tend to look more like Lorraine’s, but the layout and the idea of marginalia interested me. I’ve also been thinking about marginalia and the relationship between multiple columns of text because of Crane’s notebook.

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