Ana Verse: WπHπAπT 2

Monday, October 01, 2012

WπHπAπT 2

Could someone msg. me? I am lost. Gioia is establishment. My agreement to review Side/Berry's Outside Voices came before Berry's essay and companion responses appeared, that were met mostly with quiet. It occurred to me, as a reader, that the essay itself is quiet. Now it seems Side/Berry are closer to naming names than Berry does in the original essay and as Perloff does (to my content) in her response. I am not a self-identifying poet and not a poeticist. Argotist has issued my ebooks. Does that position my name or my writing against the avant garde poets and poeticists who Side/Berry say are to blame and for what? Prosetics is my term I put to use in 2001. Poets who formed the New Narrative in the 70s include writers/poets whose work I value a lot, yet they are in a type of poetics group surrounding narrative that seems to include writers/poets other than or unlike me. My idea of prosetics, since it turned out I was alone in it, is in practice and not a theory.

New Narrative I think is Acker, though it joined her more than she it [and] it seems she was friendly to it, and Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles?, and others, poets and poeticists, included in Gail Scott's edited essay collection called Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, published by Coach House in 2004, based on the archives of Narrativity, where I had posted a call for essays on prosetics in 2001, that went unanswered except by a graduate student studying fiction at Naropa. Mark Wallace had asked to co-edit, but the prosetics essay anthology I had envisioned stalled.

Later I started a movement to define experimental fiction called WπHπAπT, and the two men I invited in an email to join did not reply, and I did not follow up. The blog post I titled WπHπAπT is based on that email and [was] shielded from view at Ana Verse. It is not a manifesto but asks whether experimental fiction must include territory besides "nonlinear marginalized sex writing," as described in many reviews online of Biting the Error, reviews that turned out to be perhaps sales-sexy but incomplete in describing the book. WπHπAπT with its pi signs denotes the way the inquiry felt and follows in strategy those inventors in language I estimate highly. The Buffalo &Now had no panel on fiction. Eudora Welty as innovative writer I wanted to place first in my volume. It's on the notecard in "Hoss Men" in my ebook Jeffrey Side pub'd at Argotist in '10. Belladonna had a conference in NY in '09 including 100 participants and turned down "Hoss Men" for inclusion, saying that it had sparked lively discussion (in email? in person?) on the panel, who decided that I (Ann Bogle) didn't know what the essay was about. I wrote it in New York in '08 and moved in '09 to my birthplace in Minnesota. Ben Marcus wrote about experimental fiction in Harper's in 2005.