Much of the work on this site reflects my sense that writing and speaking are not simply different channels or media of language but are, instead, different modes of language that can diverge or entangle in various ratios and with quite different cognitive, aesthetic, and textual dynamics. We are, I’d suggest, so “bi-languagal” (so unconsciously adept, that is, at voicing the written and constructing representations of the spoken) that we tend not to register these differences and thereby miss their implications.
As a student of literature, I’ve been drawn to writers such as Robinson Jeffers and Jack Kerouac where the tension between speaking and writing becomes audible, visible, and imaginatively significant. Similarly, I’ve been drawn to what might be termed “textual rhetoric” and the rhetoric of textual media as ways of trying to explore these differences. And as a poet, I’ve become more interested in how the page can be used as a space for enacting, registering and storing speech (the poem as discursive action) and thereby less focused on the page as a space for inscribing writing (the poem as aesthetic object).
If any of these matters are of interest—or seem puzzling in some potentially productive way—you’re welcome to give the work gathered here a spin. A dime in the textual jukebox gets you a play; a quarter gets you three—or would if this weren’t free.
And should it happen there’s something here you’d like to talk about, let’s grab a booth. You can imagine cherry cokes or pitchers of beer, even mugs of coffee, but the table top is, please realize, chipped formica and the duck-taped upholstery definitely naugahyde.
Tim your announcements could go here, inside the box.
Thanks for stopping by and do remember: