The first event was the Lannan reading at Georgetown on Tuesday night. Poets Laura Moriarty and Elizabeth Robinson first participated in a seminar discussing poetics with the theme of “Serial: Open Forms” and then read from their work later the same evening. Seriality was a well-chosen topic—I felt it allowed a lot of scope to discuss the work both poets were doing. Elizabeth Robinson's most recent books are Under that Silky Roof and Apostrophe. Laura Moriarty's A Semblance: Selected and New Poems 1975-2007 is just out.
In discussing poetics, I was struck by the moment that Elizabeth Robinson reported that losing control over the medium of poetry had turned out to be one of the most useful things to happen to her in the development of her writing. I’ve been thinking that through—thinking how that moment of lost control is followed by a moment of reformulation. A new solution has to be found. Robinson talked about the series as an attractive form: she used a lot of terms borrowed from music, and I could see how the serial format becomes linked to a modern conception of the theme and variations format, where the metamorphosis is constant: the material revisited is not necessarily the original form of the theme, but each previous reincarnation/reinterpretation of the original material. As such, it really is an open form that creates and reinterprets points of return. 
Laura Moriarty opened her discussion with a quote from Billie Holiday: “I do a lot of travelling with my voice” and then explored the theme of community. In thinking through community, one of her major points of reference was the poet Jack Spicer—who also worked in serial forms, and developed his own theories of seriality. Later at the reading, she read a work that specifically engaged with Spicer and his neighbourhood.Moriarty was talking about a quite specific community of poets—larger those in the Bay Area around San Francisco. In 2003 when I was visiting San Francisco I got to view a little slice of this community in action.
In thinking through this idea of community, and how it relates to poetics, Moriarty talked about the new book she has just finished, A tonalist - which is also the name of a blog she writes.. Again, a term borrowed from music. (Are we all indebted to music?) She described this work as a long, discursive poem, in which she writes in conversation with the community she I part of—writing about and reviewing the work of others within her community over the course of the poem.
The open discussion following these introductions by the poets really focussed on community, and what it means to participate in a living poetic community. Engagement with other poets, production of chapbooks, running of readings—all of those things.
The reading that followed was in many ways exemplary of these poetics—although I wonder if poetics always in some way describe an unattainable ideal. There must be something to strive for in order for each new poem to have a point, and each poem surely falls a little short—and perhaps in those gaps creates the moments of interest (or, potentially, frustration). I find the Lannan series fascinating, as its something of an open discussion.
On Wednesday Nadeem Aslam, the author of Season of the Rainbirds and Maps for Lost Lovers, spoke as part of the Georgetown Writers series that David Gewanter has put together. He read from his new novel The Wasted Vigil, which will be published on 2 September by Knopf in the US, and Faber & Faber in the UK. This latest novel is set in Afghanistan: Aslam grew up in a family of journalists, and was born and lived for fourteen years in Pakistan. During this time, he said, it was impossible to remain unaware of Afghanistan, during the period of the Soviet invasion. When he was fourteen his family moved to England, where he has been based ever since.The sections of the new novel he read were packed with sensory information—Gewanter described in Maps for Lost Lovers a “wild imaginative energy” going on amid the story of ethnic relations and immigrant relations in Britain. That same energy was apparent in The Wasted Vigil—I felt almost saturated in this rich language, which, amid the appeal to the sense, wound in history and politics. I’ve wanted to read Maps for Lost Lovers for some time, and this reading has spurred me on in my determination to do so.
Aslam described living with an awareness from a young age that he was always going to be a writer—at the same time, the move to the UK had an impact upon that. Having grown up speaking Urdu, he now learned English—and in school he did better in the sciences which relied less on having perfect English skills, which he was still developing. He ended up in University, reading sciences when one day he had realised that now his English was good enough to write—and that “if I wanted to write, I could drop out”—which he did.
Answering questions following his reading, Aslam described a fascination process whereby he writes the story and then consults the repository of notebooks he has kept over the last several years, to see if he can insert the material he has gathered in those notebooks—images, occurrences—into the story.
He describes himself as quite compulsive—he says he spends 15 hours a day working on his writing: not just the act of writing itself, but the reading and thinking and problem solving that goes on around writing. He reads Urdu everyday still—talking about how this feeds into his craft in English he said that he doesn’t just have the 26 letters of the English alphabet—but he has a larger alphabet available to him, a larger conception of language.
He has had the idea for The Wasted Vigil in mind for a long time—in fact, after he finished his first novel, he tossed a coin to decide if he would work on Maps for Lost Lovers or The Wasted Vigil next. I love that chance can still play a large part in the production of art.
