by Colin Dodds.
Forget This Good Thing I Just Said – the first glimmer of inspiration, the many creative dead ends, the pandemic naptime coffees, the conversations, and the possible breakthrough – an origin storyLinks:
https://apps.apple.com/app/id1580122694
https://thecolindodds.com/2021/10/07/forget-this-good-thing-i-just-said/
- Acorns
Acorns dropped on 79th Street in Brooklyn. The ones from the higher branches smashed on the sidewalk and plunked loudly on parked cars. I sat in a folding chair outside of a place that sold coffee through a window, making it a safe option during the pandemic. I pulled the vinyl bonnet over the stroller where my son slept.
I’m remembering a composite of many days during those months. My boy Walter, three and four months old at the time, would nap bundled in the stroller, so I pushed it all over, up over Dyker heights into Bensonhurst and Gravesend, or down into Sunset Park. Summer was over. My girl had just started kindergarten at a nearby Catholic school with fifteen-foot concrete walls all around it. My wife was back from maternity leave, and I could do most of my freelance work at nightWalter was napping while acorns smacked the sidewalk, and I had 45-90 minutes before he’d wake up and demand I get the stroller moving. I removed a stapled batch of pages from the diaper bag. The batch was 20-25 pages from a larger document that held an accumulation of ideas, jokes, slant rhymes, half-plots that I’d dashed off into notebooks and word documents, or tapped into my phone in spare moments. The whole thing was around 150 pages of bewildering dead ends, and stuff that made me clench my jaw and smirk with excitement.
- Poesy, Politics and Being Painted into a Corner
I had an idea to join some of the fragments together into poems. Joining ideas, breaking lines. What stopped me was a physical sensation first and foremost – a sudden tiredness, like the blood had drained from my extremities.
Only later could I connect the feeling with a thought – a suspicion that poetry could no longer do what I needed done. Poetry gave me too ways to hedge my bets and have it both ways. Where poetry had seemed free, it now seemed soft and dishonest. It made me think of the famous Auden poem that ends “We must love one another or die,” or “We must love one another and die.” He couldn’t figure it out, and so just tried to live it down. After 28 years of reading and writing poems, there seemed to be a helplessness and even a deliberate incoherence to poetry that stopped me in my tracks.
I’m almost ashamed to say it, but it was a review of my own most recent published book of poetry that helped me decide. It was a bad review, in more ways than one. The critic referred to me as being from San Diego, which doesn’t argue for his close-reading skills. He didn’t like the tone or the structure of the book, and what I heard in the grudging moments of praise in his review may not have been what he meant. What I heard was “these are great lines, but not great poems.”
While the acorns dropped and my boy slept and the stapled pages hung in my hand, I spun through the possibilities. Other genres – flash fiction, prose poetry – didn’t feel right. I toyed with the idea of taking all that material and fashioning it into a hybrid text, like Issa’s Year of My Life, with stretches of prose setting up the short poems. But no. That’s when the idea struck me – a book of aphorisms. It was audacious and a little scary. I laughed out loud at the thought.
A book of terse and mighty pronouncements! I’d grown up reading aphorisms, and always associated them with thundering, naïve megalomania – the domain of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Heraclitus. But I’d also found a softer side to them in David Markson’s Notecard Quartet, and Dave Hickey’s Dust Bunnies.
For the reader, aphorisms are like eating popcorn. For a writer, aphorisms are scary. They’re short. There’s not much room for caveats. The set up and the landing have to add up, or else you may as well put ellipses (…apologies for what I’m about to say, but never mind I’m sorry…) on either end. They can flat-out fail.
Aphorisms contain ideas, but don’t buttonhole the reader. They prompt and provoke, but don’t ask you to sign on the dotted line and join up, at least the good ones. The good ones stop you in your tracks and poke a hole in reality, then go away.
Also, aphorisms go for the breakthrough, the spit-take. As a one-time class clown, I carry the strong suspicion that real joy and wisdom is right at my elbow, not tucked away atop some masthead, or waiting demurely at the end of some endless jeremiad, penance or dialectic.
So I started to look at the accumulation in a different way. I pulled out the prose, the poetry and the more obvious prescriptions. Don’t get me wrong. I like to live, laugh, love as much as the next guy, but being told to do it really takes me out of the mood.
This was going on in the middle of the pandemic and the presidential election, when I read the news more than usual, and was treated to more rhetoric than I wanted. Everything was being boiled down to ultimatums about what to believe or what to do. Agree or disagree, choose a side. Language was being put to bad use, and it seemed as though that’s all it would ever be put to.
Just by using language, I had the sense that I was cooking with poison. Aphorisms seemed to offer a way ouForget This Good Thing I Just Said is a work that seeks to leave loops open, to build a highway of offramps. At its core, the collection is an act of faith that we are closer to discovery than conclusion, and nearer the beginning of our shared story than its end… I guess rhetoric catches up with all of us.
- The Problems with a Book of Aphorisms
As a genre, aphorisms aren’t simple. For me, one challenge was aesthetic. I always disliked poetry collections with more than one poem on a page. And it seemed like having multiple aphorisms per page would result in them stealing focus from one another. But having a book with one aphorism per page would require a book with either a ton a blank paper, or one with a very strange shape, like a matchbook that’s three inches thick.
And as I revised and rewrote the collection, the question of how to order the aphorisms kept nagging at me. I felt a temptation to structure the book into themes or chapters or moods or seasons or something like that. But grouping the aphorisms like that felt like an apology. It seemed that by grouping them, I’d be watering down the individual force of each one.
Also, let’s get real – who’s going to publish a book of aphorisms? It’s not an established commercial genre, nor one that most literary presses publish. It’s not even experimental, in the way that most presses define it. And it lacks the gentleness and humility with which it seems most small presses prefer to be approached.
- Look Out Honey, ‘Cause I’m Using Technology
Around this time, I was talking with my close friend Matthew Dublin, a true polymath who’d devoted the last decade to becoming a serious software developer. In the past, we’d collaborated on an album and a few short films, and we were talking about potential creative projects, possibly involving technology. By then, it was early spring of 2021. The vaccines were just starting to make the rounds, but everyone had been living mostly indoors and online for a year.
Somewhere in the course of those conversations, Matt mentioned Brian Eno’s Bloom Worlds, an app where you can create ambient music and hypnotic patterns with the touchscreen of a phone or tablet. That got us talking about another one of Eno’s apps, called Oblique Strategies. It was originally a deck of cards, each with a short instruction for a music producer who’s hit a creative dead end. You’d shuffle them and try the suggestion on the card, such as “remove ambiguities and convert to specifics.” The idea was that the random suggestion would derail a misguided or exhausted train of thought. I had always liked the spirit of it – the idea that what you most needed to hear in a given moment was likely a bolt from the blue.
Oblique Strategies was also an app, which simulated the experience of drawing cards at random, each one with a simple statement. And the app’s approach showed us a way forward for Forget This Good Thing I Just Said.
First, a smartphone app could deliver a single aphorism per screen. Second, by randomizing the sequence of the sayings, it would allow each one to better stand on its own. The random sequence also meant that the reader would necessarily have a different experience each time they opened the app. And releasing Forget This Good Thing I Just Said as an app would save months and years of bowing and scraping to publishers.
The result of all this sitting out in the cold, experiencing a physical repudiation of poetry and a deep suspicion of language itself, writing, thinking, rewriting, having conversations, coding, and so forth is this strange new thing – Forget This Good Thing I Just Said. It’s a book, an app, an oracle of sorts, and possibly a conversation between the author, reader and the mysterious forces of coincidence and synchronicity. Will it work? Will anyone care? Who knows? But it’s an act of hope. And I’m excited to see what happens.
###