jennieytallman.com

This is where we begin to see the fish king take a real shape. This king is a she, naturally, as she was originally a boat. Let’s talk about the way these pages are set up. There is some variation throughout, but this is probably the first place I’ve so blatantly mixed the mediums: handwriting, black-out erasure, and ransom-style composition (which I, in this gallery, consider free-writing).

I wonder if I will discover yet more mediums as I keep going with this project. Ways of putting words on a page I am, as yet, unaware of. Already I’ve noticed a certain freedom from grammar & structure beginning to assert itself in these poems.

Voila, we’ve found a prompt! Poets, free from grammar. Free from rules of sentence and patterns learned as children. Mix it up. Ignore convention.

Take a look at this article at Publishers Weekly by Susan Steinberg: What Happened to Experimental Writing. There is a lot to love here, but I am going to specifically share this bit, because it relates quite well to today’s piece.

I’ve learned that the term experimental makes some people uneasy. I try to imagine what they imagine. Words scattered violently across a page. Numbers instead of letters. Violated punctuation. And I guess I understand why there could be resistance; there often is to that which goes against our expectations. But in art, I often want my expectations, which are generally low, to be shattered.