Re/Re/Rewrite February 2022: One Damn Thing After Another
Hello Rewriters!
“Parataxis, like history, is one damn thing after another.”
That’s Anahid Nersessian in
The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life,
a book that looks at the relationship between certain poetic forms and their historical moments. Parataxis, or the placing of word phrases next to each other with no respect for cause and effect, was produced in part by a sense of bewilderment over increasing industrialization of the 18th century. It was shocking as a form; sentences that told stories gave way to collections of things with no particular order!
Parataxis avoids hierarchy. It eschews transcendence.
“Parataxis… simply does not care
how
things happen; it cares merely that they are happening and about the obligation that they be stopped,” Nersessian explains. Shifting to an example closer to our time, she uses the image of filmmaker Derek Jarman, standing in his beautiful seaside garden in the shadow of a nuclear power plant; the garden itself was parataxis, a joyous queer jumble, and as such, a big fuck you to not only to ecological devastation but to homophobia and AIDS as well.
Our invitation this month:
Let’s see if parataxis, or the placement of words and phrases side by side without regard for hierarchy or cause and effect, helps articulate our own sense of contemporary bewilderment. Find a couple or few things that vex or bewilder; line them up; describe them in lines; put the lines together; don’t figure it all out; instead, open up a space that invites us to leap over – or into – the gap with you.
If you’d like an example, here’s one: In her attempt to grapple with a litany of crises, Juliana Spahr wrote
“Transitory/Momentary,”
and made great use of parataxis. Here’s an excerpt, moving from birds to oil to song:
The Brent geese are social, adaptable. They fly around together, learning from each other, even as these groups are often unstable, changing from season to season. Songs in their most popular versions tend to be epiphanic, gorgeous with swelling chord changes, full of lament too. And this song, like many, expresses the desire to be near someone who is now lost. It travels as something layered, infiltrated, unconfused with its refusals to make a simple sense. I want to give you this song sung in a bar in Oakland one night during the ongoing oil wars. The singer had clearly been lost once, but they sang as someone who eventually got in the car and drove out of Bakersfield, perhaps early in the morning, the sun just starting to rise, or perhaps later after sun-up, the light washing out everything in Bakersfield as the sun is wont to do there.
As always, post early and often, borrow and revise, write or make, and
put your parataxes here
.
We’ll meet to look at the goods on
February 27!
-Holly