Let X = X

When I can squeeze some thinking in, I have been thinking in. Thinking about lineation much, and why not? I am tired of it, and also frustrated by it, and also I still admire those who bother or can but. But I just can't do the math. Years ago, Liam Rector the director of Bennington Writing Seminars in Vermont, said of my work, "I think there is no way for Ann but through." He wrote this in one of the last evaluations he wrote for me in our semester. It was as if he had, at that point, come to a place of acceptance (not acquiescence, but it almost felt so) of my designs on words. I had heard him repeat the phrase "thru-line" to me at least one hundred times during our mentor/mentee months. He suspected I had none. I knew that I did, but did not want to fall into the trap of trying to prove it except through the work, in the poems.

Mr. Rector was actually referring to the pushiness of my poems, and how they were kind of relentlessly forward, and not necessarily meditative or containing a status (or he may refer to it as the poem's "first world,") but producing static for him instead. They didn't begin or end, but continued with themselves. He didn't say that exactly, but he might have, he was trying to check me on my intentionality and on how present I was with the movement. I was obsessed with lineation then, and the math of it. (Geometry, Trig, and all invisible work underneath)...and tied this all the inevitable relationship with architecture and theory of. The connections form a messy web and catch too many bugs. What I really wanted was to just GO. The line was a distraction, a pretense, a radio part. It was a problem.

Now I say I can't do the math because that is the connection I am making to the act of lineating. It's mathematical, and should be correct and correcting. I have abondoned the line for now, to dwell with the words. What the radio is, makes, it's x's and o's. Here is an interesting article I recently read that made me hot (uhuh), and so I thought I'd share.