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The Self-Interview of Rey Armenteros (first published in Modern Literature)

23 April 2024 by Rey Armenteros

Where do you usually write? At a computer? Longhand on a yellow pad? Typewriter?

Ideally, I write prose on a keyboard, because I need the speed of writing to come close to the speed of thought. If something occurs to me out in public somewhere, I might scrawl phrases and ideas that I will later flesh out on the keyboard. In contrast, when I am writing poetry, I write on a notepad (or something small), and I am standing up and walking or pacing the house. I want to be physically active. I am taking steps, and my thoughts are striding along. The speed of the words as they are recorded needs to be slower in poetry, so that I can deliberate a little more, hold them in front of me before letting them go.

How much research do you do?

I used to answer this by offering the list of every book I ever read. I learned something from them, even the bad ones, and the way my thoughts and writing style formed was in large thanks to them. So, I never research anything. If I don’t know it, I don’t write about it. But that’s not exactly true. There are times when I’m curious about something, and I look it up with the possible intention of writing about some aspect of it. But I generally write like I draw pictures; I just do it off the top of my head.

Is there a relationship between your art and your writing?

There is in that they are made from the same source, and the concerns I have in one run parallel with the other. There is also the idea that writing and drawing come from the same prehistoric backyard. They may have been linked, as is evidenced in pictograms. I sometimes feel this link when I’m covering my world with inky marks as easily as I cover it with words. But I go into each one with different ideas in mind.

I’ll give you three examples — two writing and one drawing. In my memoir, I naturally turn to the past to get something from that time. By contrast, when I write poetry, I make up a lot of it, almost as if writing snippets of responses to some of my favorite books, as if reacting off night dreams. Better yet, I am really trying for the poem to come to life without having a strong reception to a past. Poems are about right now, with tenebrous links to past and future. When I paint, I try to bring up the images I have in mind. There might be a narrative sequence to these images, and they might even insinuate words, but they are wordlessly quiet, even if word balloons show up with mysterious symbols in them.

How many half-finished works do you have?

Like most anybody, too many. If you go back to every idea I put to pen, it would be impossible to count. I do have a battalion of books filed away in various stages of completion that are still in the running for becoming finished. They are a collection I keep that somehow describes my possible future career as it might look with that many accomplishments. I don’t know the number off the top of my head, but it is slowly growing. I do know that together, they comprise over two million words.

Does writing energize you?

It could if I’m excited about what I’m writing. Sometimes, I don’t feel like writing, mostly because I have nothing in mind at the moment, but I force myself to continue the practice. And this could energize me if I find a pot of gold in this dense forest. But often I feel bored or dejected when nothing comes out of these sporadic adventures.

When I do have something to say, it is quite different. It could also go one way or the other. I either take the idea I have in mind and use words to choke the life out of the voice, and thus kill the piece, or the two come together nicely. I get excited when the latter circumstance is happening.

Do you make demands on the reader?

I used to. I feel they were unrealistic demands. I used to feel that if a reader did not understand the connections I was trying to make, then I had done what I could. This was frustrating for anyone, because these connections I believed in were more obscure than most readers would allow time for. So, I stepped back, and I moved to a more communicative approach and dropped a lot of these wonderful ideas along the way. They might have been wonderful, but I didn’t have the ability to bring them into this world.

I now write with more responsibility as a writer. I don’t merely tack on the duty to a capable reader (although I still make demands on the reader, I think). The idea is that you have to supply the words with different layers of understanding. The texture is there at the most superficial level, and that is the one thing everyone will recognize, consciously or half-consciously. And then there is the shape the texture dresses and is influenced by, and this could be the events or the sequence or the actual representation of things. And then the forces at work that animate the shapes, if you go in deep enough, and then finally the patterns the forces create, if you are stepping so far back as a reader, that you can almost sense it all. Regardless if a reader can or cannot, it is all there. And all of these things have a place in the experience of the reader, whether the reader actively responds to it or not.

Have you ever gotten reader’s block?

I’m not sure I even know what that is. But I do go through periods of not reading anything but comic books. During such instances, my writing suffers for it. I have a long list of things to read, but each book needs to arrive at the right time. If I feel I’m not ready for a certain poetry book or a rereading of Moby Dick, I put it off until my current state-of-mind is in line with it, or the right season has arrived. Sometimes, because of these dynamics I place on my reading, I don’t have something ready, so I find I’m reading comics or art history books. I’d like to read poetry everyday — at least, that’s been the plan. I don’t own enough poetry books to fill my reading year, and the libraries no longer carry much of such stuff anymore. So, I need to buy more poetry.

What’s your favorite unappreciated book?

I would have said Moby Dick or Nostromo, but that might not be right for this question. If I argue that nobody reads Moby Dick and hence it is unappreciated, then I would be answering the question. But Moby Dick is still celebrated, so I should find a better answer. There are so many books that fall under this heading.

We were talking about the responsibility of the writer, and as a reader, you have a responsibility too. I don’t know if most people realize this. You have the responsibility to try to turn the book around and find it through the author’s time and place. Who was this person when the words were put to paper and what was really being said? When you pick up a book, there are certain things the book is telling you about it before you even start to read. The title, the cover, its dedication. They could be sending you the wrong message, but you try to figure it out early on, maybe to see if it is your cup of tea or to try to understand where the author is coming from. If you read it and pick up on something other than what is in the words and implications, it is hard to ignore, and the reader should make an attempt to understand this. For example, when reading a 19th Century novel, where the language is more formal, it is easy to dismiss it as hoity-toity and forget that its stiff style might actually be the weave it needed for the story. I don’t know if my idea is coming across. It’s complicated, but I do feel the reader has a responsibility to get at what the writer is trying to accomplish — to try to step into the writer’s shoes — even if they don’t care for the work before them.

Do you view writing as a spiritual practice?

I don’t know. There was a time I did, and I’m sure there is some idea of that now lingering still in the back of my head. Yes, all types of art-making has to have a spiritual component for it to even be an art form. But if you hold that concept up to the light, as if admiring a piece of well-made machinery at the same moment as when you are trying to make it work, that thing that makes it run so well has just ceased operations. If writing becomes a means of getting the spiritual out, it won’t. I recall a long time ago writing some piece of inspired narration, and I was addressing the soulful outlook I was having with the richest words I could pluck from my growing well of eloquent words. It was the closest, as far as I can remember, of having felt that inner spirit at the same time as I was working. And the real problem came later when I tried reading this thing, and it felt like scrubbing sandpaper on your tongue. I felt so embarrassed. Because you declare something, it does not make it so. Lesson learned.

Have you ever read anything that made you feel different about fiction?

Yes, I’m sure I did, though nothing comes to mind. I could say the same things about other genres of literature, not just fiction. The Lives of theTwelve Caesars by Suetonius is one of those books that is not fiction, but it made me feel a bond with the humor of the time. I was mesmerized by the idea that something that was two thousand years old could make me laugh like that! The humor in it seemed to transcend time. Then again, the credit could be given to the translator, Robert Graves, whose broad talents might have nudged the English version to be funnier than the Latin. I’ve always meant to read a different translation of that book to see if it brought out the same comedic effervescence that Graves’s version offered.

What authors did you dislike at first?

The ones I dislike, I usually don’t change my opinion on, even after reading other works by the same author, sometimes multiple times — and I read them several times because I’m such a glutton for punishment, honestly. I remember not understanding what made Charles Dickens so great. A Tale of Two Cities is one of the worst pieces of classic literature I had ever read, because of the convenient coincidences, the cardboard characters, the tidy lesson at the end — all staples of Dickens story-craft, as I learned from some of his other books. Then I read excerpts of this book years later, and I noted how well he turned a sentence, how the pacing between the words and imagery were trains of thoughts and diction that shared the rails at the same time. And I respected him thereafter as a capable stylist, even if the actual stories, though iconic, were not all that exhilarating.

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Essay versus Poem

13 February 2022 by Rey Armenteros

What’s the difference?

Oh, there’s a difference!

You type one and hand write the other one.

One should come out with facility, almost like thought, and the other is to be built like an object of sound structure and appealing form.

If one is your involuntary signature, your handwriting, as they say, the other is your thoughtfully-conceived drawing technique.

One is hit or miss, and the other one is hit when enough time has passed between each episode of shaping and deliberating and searching and toiling.

A successful essay is a thought on a line, unbroken and moving on (and not necessarily forward), and anything else attached to it, such as a clever rhythm or sound structure is nothing more than a bonus.

A successful poem is a thought on a form that may at first seem to be on a line, that takes any shape, disposition, or length within a conceived structure, and which may allow any bonus to be added to it for the benefit of added fascination but at the expense of precluding any possibility of attaining perfection.

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36 Stories versus 20 Stories

14 November 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Myths make exciting stories. But the Myth of Sisyphus is not one of these. Notwithstanding the useful message, Sisyphus is rather droll, and I guess that’s the point. It has a teaching value. Another myth that is just as boring is the idea that there are only a limited number of stories in the world, and that all the stories come from these few stories. Not just another tiresome idea that has become a cliche, it is menacing the way we think about stories and the value we place in stories. It feels fatalistic, as if the meanings we place on life have always been put on an assembly line. Going up the side of the mountain with this great, big story the size and shape of a boulder only so that it comes down as intended. Do we really believe stories have that type of predictability? If so, wouldn’t they have gone extinct thousands of years ago?

According to certain crowds, the “hero’s journey” by Joseph Campbell properly outlines every story since creation. If everyone believes that the hero’s journey is the only story worth any merit, then anything that falls outside of that model may get lambasted for not following form. This happens all the time when consumers of popular material (movies, TV shows, bestselling novels, and such) admit they can’t understand something and then relegate it as a work that is subpar. Or worse, they group all works that represent the real world as “slice-of-life.”

Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey brought out the notion that many older cultures followed the same model of telling a myth. His theories raise the idea that there are a number of steps the hero takes along his journey before finally making the right decision and saving his society.

I don’t doubt that there are a great many stories that follow this one model. Just look at Hollywood and how it can’t get past whatever sells, and if the ideas of Joseph Campbell are a hot item with the public at large, Hollywood will base every heroic movie they make on his model.

I ask such people that believe in the omnipresence of the Campbell model if they can fit Proust into that model. Where do you fit Chekhov? Does Hemingway so patly follow this formula for making stories?

I won’t deny it is an interesting idea. Back in the days when I was fascinated by such things, I learned from my first creative writing professor that such an idea even existed — that there were only a limited number of stories ever told in the world. In those ideas, it was fashionable to group conflict into one of three categories: man versus man, man versus nature, and man versus himself. There were others I discovered later like man versus society and man versus machine, but if you were of the disposition of simplifying everything into some core, then you would have to admit that the former sounds like a variation on man versus nature, and the latter of man versus man. And the one known as man versus fate might have been nothing more than a different way of looking at man versus himself. But this was about conflict, which was not the same as plot or “type of story.” 

In those creative writing class days, I learned that there was even a writer that had put a book together that catalogued every possible story ever created. He got it down to thirty-something stories.

My initial reaction was to reject this. To my youthful mind, it seemed just so uncreative to follow the same story over and over. But I was curious. I looked up this dusty book in our college library and actually found it! I looked through it, almost checked it out, but I knew I was not going to read it. It was too old, and the writing was thick with a style I couldn’t understand. I let it go.

Years later, I found myself thinking about such things again. I don’t remember what started me on this return to old ideas, but I looked up the thirty-something stories and found the man and his book. I didn’t have to read the book itself since someone had summarized the thirty-six different story plots of Georges Polti on a convenient website.

I don’t think an audience of today would sympathize with Polti’s catalogue of story archetypes. There was a focus on types of stories we just don’t see anymore, such as stories about “erroneous judgment” and “slayer of kin unrecognized.”  There were two different plots for self-sacrifice: “self-sacrifice for kin” and “self-sacrifice for an ideal,” and though the two are clearly different, you would think that a book looking for the fundamental components of a story would recognize that the two were the same general idea. There was “rivalry of kin” and “enmity of kin,” and Polti distinguished what made the two different. There was “crime pursued by vengeance” and “vengeance taken for kin upon kin,” and again I realize the the flavor of two such stories would be quite different from each other, but they seem to belong to the same type of story. There was “adultery” and “murderous adultery.”

Polti had taken many of his ideas from classical literature and some of the French literature of his day. To our ears, it sounds like ideas from another era. And even so, it is a product of its times. Polti was only cataloguing what made sense to him at the dawn of the 20th Century. If there is a great difference between enmity of kin and rivalry of kin, it is because the difference might have been more pronounced in his day.

A more recent writer came up with his story types. Ronald Tobias was writing books and producing documentaries, and he came up with his leaner list of possible stories. To me, his choices have the smell of Hollywood behind them. This is a more practical look with only twenty types. On the surface, it seems like he had a few redundant pairs. We get “metamorphosis” and “transformation,” but the first one is an actual magical metamorphosis whereas the second is when someone merely changes. We get “love” and “forbidden love,” and again, we know they are obviously different, but in the end, every love story has its challenges, and one possibility is when that love is forbidden. I suppose they are quite different because one of them demands a tragic ending.

Tobias gives us “ascension” and “descension,” which he agrees are two sides of the same coin. I can see the argument for having the extra story type because it changes the character of the story if the character is ascending into a better a life or going in the other direction. But if we are really boiling it down to the core elements, I would have stuck to the logic of giving just the elements and conflating the two.

I was thinking how Tobias’s more contemporary take on the different stories would surely sound out-of-date at some point in the future. This led me to reflect on how times change and how people create new ways to look at things. It could be that story theorists in the future would find the way we look at story all wrong. And like certain stories in Polti’s book seem to have fallen out of fashion, new stories might rise, coming from who knows where? This goes well with the young man that I was, believing that the possibilities in stories were virtually endless.

After reading about this and spending long hours contemplating the different possibilities, it wasn’t long before I started formulating my own story types. I came up with 26 different ones and explained them in an article I self-published long ago, and now that I am looking at them after all this time has passed, I see that some of them are redundant to me today. In the article, I prefaced it by saying that there might be only two possible stories: someone goes on a trip or a stranger comes to town (as it was described to me in some random website). But I then added that you can break it down further into one story, which is the one where there is a problem that needs to be fixed.

When you bring it down to just one story type (about the main character presented with a problem that needs taking care of), I ask what is the difference of that and attempting to define the word, story? You can look up the definition of story and then agree that it describes every story that you can think of, but does that really encapsulate all the different types of stories? It is nothing but a terse explanation.

I don’t fault Polti or Tobias for constructing their theories of story types.I think they are both commendable projects, and such work makes you consider parallels between stories. It also raises the idea of structure and is a great tool for instruction. If we recognize repetitions in their story models, it is because there must be overlap between these distinctions. And the overlap can invade certain stories, provoking new stories. The story type of sacrifice or loss could be an essential component in a love story. A revenge story could also be a quest.

On the surface, categorizations like this, if made well, always sound correct. They are put together by words, and words signify things. But words are often used to sway and to convince and to manipulate, and that enigmatic quality in any jumbled line of thought is what most makes them fascinating, as the words help picture impressions when telling a tale of loss and redemption clouded with mysteries that we hope to unravel on a journey through any story. Words are used to argue a point, yes, but they are best made for the things that make less rational sense, such as a story, because when we ask how many stories there have ever been, we fail to see that there have been as many types of stories as there have been stories told.

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Possibilities

22 August 2021 by Rey Armenteros

I make poems as if I were following the rules of a game.

But the sounds of words play no part in it. I almost never consider the audial nature of language — not when making thoughtful decisions. Things like puns that make an appearance through the parallel surfaces of words share the most random connections. I feel they are the least likely to level reflections of any depth. The same goes with rhyming. A poetry handbook might, for instance, point at the way wall and fall rhyme in one stanza, intimating that they are placed in such positions in a poem in order to underscore their connection, because there is meaning to be had when you fall off a wall.

But then, that is an English phenomenon, which immediately implies that the verbal artists from another language might not connect those two ideas in the same way because they would not rhyme in the same way in their own language. So falling off a wall seems to have a peculiarly English significance.

No, my poems would have nothing to do with such incidental coincidences. Instead of following the beats of a language, they follow the rhythm of situations. Yes, this is like prose. But such poetry would not simply be formed by paragraphs. I play with the rules of sentences and come up with new things. I use the following tenets to make my plain sentences into poems:

  • A poem should be presented before you in its entirety; so, it should be no longer than a page, or at least no more than two facing pages.
  • If prose is composed of paragraphs and sentences, and poems of stanzas and lines, my poems would have one foot in each camp. It would be stanzas that are made up of sentences.
  • In such a basic structure as three stanzas, you could still make other configurations. You can have multiple paragraphs inside a stanza by having all paragraphs that follow the first one inside a stanza indented. In this way, you can have three parts to a one-page poem formed by stanzas that each hold more than one paragraph.
  • There are other possibilities. In this type of system, you could write a poem that is only constructed of one-sentence stanzas, underscoring the line by having it more visible.
  • Another one is that of writing one solid stanza as a poem. A slight deviation from this would be making the stanza have multiple indented paragraphs, which would adhere to straight-forward prose — and hence, look nothing like a poem.
  • Of course, you could make three or four or five stanzas without interior indentations and leave it at that.
  • Or each stanza could be made up of two sentences. Each sentence could be a separate paragraph. If the first paragraph is not indented, and the second one is, the prose poem made up of such “couplets” would naturally look like a poem (but only at first glance), even if it follows all the rules of mundane grammar.
  • Rhythm could be established by number of sentences per stanza, as well as by types of sentence structures, as well as by depicted situation, as well as by the occasional repetition.
  • If it is one poem per page or two facing pages, the pages in the poetry book might look monotonous. One way around this is having some of the poems have no title. Some could have a number or symbol to introduce it. Poems could also have bold subtitles above each stanza. Coupled poems could appear on the same page. Unrelated tiny poems could do the same thing. Some poems could start halfway down the page, which would diametrically mirror the shorter poems that finish halfway up the page.
  • In addition to these basic rules, I invite a few auxiliary possibilities. Sentences can be numbered, for instance. And in the interests of lists, two or three columns in one page comprised of two- or three-word sentences can be allowed now and again, when I’m in the mood.

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Proposition: A Good Mystery without Solutions

18 July 2021 by Rey Armenteros

The problem with mysteries is the mystery itself, what culminates in every bad ending with an overly-rational conclusion. This is a shame because the mood, the tone, and situation set up in mystery stories create immediate interest in the reader, who feels that they are being enticed, who cannot help but keep moving onward. Then the ending arrives, and the murderer is found, and every conceivable moment of note in the story is conscientiously explained.

The real mystery should encompass life’s mysteries where the answers sought are metaphysical. Maybe second person point-of-view along with first person to travel disheveled rooms, like those archaic narrative video games that brought you to room after room with clues and that were populated by not a single other person. I enjoyed the calmness of these game mysteries where it was just you and an endless landscape of interiors and exteriors, objects that became keys that led you to more places to find the final clue that would unlock the meaning of it all.

When I think of mysteries, I think of Raymond Chandler. I think of memos to myself, the writer. Just write like Raymond Chandler, I would remind myself. That was my solution, except there was the one thing that pulls his work down a notch. It was the pulp tradition that still held traces of evidence in his stories. Chandler evokes this in moments when his private eye, Marlowe, goes into his desk drawer and straps on the gun. This decision comes after incidences when he gets caught and beaten up, when he meets vampires and ghouls bred in Hollywood in exotic settings from a Conan the barbarian story. Unknowingly, Chandler tips his hand, revealing his sense of Dashiell Hammett, the creator of hard-boiled fiction who happened to write for the pulps like Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan. It was boy’s fiction, in other words. Boys needed to grow up tough to knock out the rival boy and then grab the girl. Hammett did not bother hiding any of these notions, and that is why some of his work is hard to read today.

Chandler is different, more flexible, with greater reach through the decades. Chandler credits Hammett as the source of the hard-boiled strain of the mystery, and it is true that Hammett’s best stories open the curtain for Chandler. Though Hammett created it, Chandler made his entrance afterward and truly perfected the form.

Even though it retains snippets of what I recognize as Conan.

As I have always said, I enjoy mystery novels… until we get to the ending. Perhaps it could be that I am strange, and there is something to be valued in having all loose ends tied up. I don’t know. To me, such clarity does not depict any reality I know. Mysteries in real life almost always remain mysteries, and you find this out eventually, after having sought their solutions for too long.

If a mystery story is like filling out every correct answer in a questionnaire, then the day I write one, I will use the questionnaire as a starting point and keep it close until we get near the ending, where the questionnaire has been cut into smaller pieces with its words reorganized so that it answers itself. I am not going to be the one to answer them. I propose tales that don’t require even half the answers expected, where the mystery goes beyond the crime, where the tone is a spiritual blood relation to the style of Chandler (without mimicking him, mind you), and doing away with that one flaw in every writer who introduces a gun and then is obligated to have it go off — where if you strap on a gun, you never end up shooting it, because if you get a chance to use it, you will see that it mires your path instead of opening it by blowing holes in it. The gun is not the one Chekhov propounded. It is a gun that makes an appearance that does not need to be shot at all, but if it is shot, you could end up merely hitting birds with it. But you still have to strap it on because the possibilities open up the moment you do. I like that kind of story where the possibilities do not narrow as you get to the end, but expand. You don’t know where the story is going, but it takes you…

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The Spaces between the Idiomatic Expressions

25 October 2020 by Rey Armenteros

I don’t give too much thought to the one that goes, “He has no imagination.” Nobody uses it anymore, but I find myself using it a lot these days. Did I finally crack the code?

When I listen to somebody saying something, and they tell me through their words that they are not really thinking around the problem, it tells me they are not using their imagination. It’s the words that have been repeated by them and everybody else that arrive at saying nothing. Certain phrases and expressions come and go, but using your imagination is never going to go out of style, right? Because, I think, imagination is the interior agency of an individual going outside the prescribed points of contact in a situation and investigating what unseen agency may be affecting the situation.

The problem is really the words. They fail to hit the nail on the head, to hit a grand slam homer — always pulling the cat out of the bag, testing the waters, putting one over on you, having its cake and eating it too. There you have it. Popular expressions are hands down looking to be clear as a bell, but they are a wolf in sheep’s clothing. All of this goes without saying, but don’t shoot the messenger.

Language, as an applied form of communication, has such a limited range of options. If it needs to be clear, that means it cannot be pliable. I remember when it was popular for people to say “thinking outside the box.” It meant something back then. The funny part was that every time you said it, you were doing exactly the opposite of what it was for. I woke up one day, and suddenly people were using it. What was surprising to me was that I had just made this raw drawing that had a square-like center, and in the middle of that inked room, I brushed in bold, ugly letters, “My life is a fucking box!”

I thought it meant the same thing. I was living in a prison in those days because I was stuck in a job and relegated to an apartment on the off hours, and I hated everything about it. It was a limited life, and when people started using that expression, I looked at it as a form of byproduct that comes from a limited life. What sounded like people exercising low levels of imagination was symptomatic for the quality of the lives themselves, and I was turning just as robotic as the masses because of my limited means, the limited connections that were available to me.

At a company meeting, somebody would say, “Now that’s thinking outside the box,” and I would groan, wondering at what point I was going to lose every little particle of creative substance I had left by such close proximity to this sort of exchange.

How much of this does it take for you to lose your imagination? Living in a box could sap you of everything you held dear in life, because what was life without imagination? I never thought I could merely exist and do what everyone else was doing. It was never part of the plan.

That was why when I used to hear the much older expression, “So-and-so has no imagination.” I would be unclear about what was meant. Not exactly sure how that applied to the particular situation that caused such a verdict on that person, I was convinced that the person was stricken with some deformity. It was one of the lowest things you can call anyone, and I always failed to find the situation in question proof positive that they had this ailment. No, it was never clear to me, but I noticed that such a reaction to someone usually came when the targeted person was not in league with your ideas, and nothing more. To me, it was becoming a question of not just the person who purportedly lacked imagination but of the person responsible for the observation.

People still use that outdated expression, and I wonder if they know what they mean by it. I think it is usually meant for someone who doesn’t think outside the box. I don’t think I know anymore.

Did it mean something before and now the meaning is lost because the times have changed and we don’t think under those limitations anymore? The old generation is no longer around to explain it to us.

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When They Don’t Rhyme

11 October 2020 by Rey Armenteros

We were getting work done on the house we had just bought. I would talk to the various contractors for repiping, for windows, for shutters, and every time they asked me for a decision about color or placement, I would tell them I had to talk to my wife about it, along with the price and details and such. And they would make that face and say they understood because “happy wife, happy life.”

When I heard it enough times, I recollected a few thoughts on rhyme poetry during the early days of Modern English, when they were still contributing to the construction of the language we now know. This book was mentioning the power of rhyme when you were trying to place two ideas on the same footing. When words rhymed, it was to accentuate a connection they shared. I had never thought of that before, how in rhyming poetry, you could (and perhaps should) consider the words that are rhyming and their relationships within the wider canvas of stanzas and other words. I liked the idea, but the example of wife and life the book used could clearly not be used today without sounding hackneyed. The fact that those words rhyme give nothing if not that they happen to rhyme in English. What could have been a profound discovery four hundred years ago becomes nothing but a circumstance today, and the connections between the meaning of your life and how it is allied with a person you would call wife could no longer float.

This life-wife poetry is skipping across the surface of reality to make the fasteners that hold them together nothing more than incidental to a language. Perfect rhyme in old western poetry can mean one thing — and that is a strong binding; whereas slant rhyme might give us a slightly skewed meaning. But if the words you intend do not happen to rhyme — what then?

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Prose Techniques in Poetry

28 August 2020 by Rey Armenteros

These are the rules for my poetry. I used to think I was writing prose poetry, and I suppose I am. But that distinction — prose poetry… I wonder if it still has as much weight as it did twenty years ago, when poets were still talking about it, and there were anthologies devoted to the form.

Anyway, I was sitting here going over the mess. The rules reign what it can of a poetry that has no lines.

Even though I don’t use lines, I do have stanzas. Stanzas hold everything together. Stanzas are demarcated by a line break. Inside a stanza, you will find sentences, not lines. You might even find paragraphs. Paragraphs are demarcated by an indentation. They sit right under the previous paragraph within a stanza.

An idea occurred to me as I was forming my rules. Have a stanza with two paragraphs. If I follow my rules of stanzas and paragraphs, each paragraph is indented. It will have the opposite look to traditional line stanzas that start without indentation and leave indentations for whatever lines spill over into a new typographical line. On the surface, it still catches the look of traditional poetry, even if it is still prose.

The stanzas could be of any size. If the entire poem is one stanza, and there are multiple paragraphs inside it, then it might look like prose poetry.

The stanzas could be one sentence each. With a line break in between, this could have the look of traditional lines that are not grouped into stanzas.

If a stanza has two paragraphs, and each one is just a single sentence, then it may feel like couplets.

I can take this idea further. If each paragraph formed by a single sentence is short enough to keep within the margins, the visual form may look close to metered poetry even if comprised by paragraphs that happen to be single sentences.

This has other possibilities. A list could be a sentence of three or so words per item. I could even include two or three columns in a page of such a poem, if needed.

There are other ways of establishing symmetrical unity outside of meter and rhyme. I have been toying with the idea of grammar rules set to a tempo. What would happen if you had a compound sentence before a simple sentence? What kinds of rhythms could you find when you vary this?

Or if a sentence had an object and another did not…

One paragraph could begin with a complete sentence. Every sentence after that will have its subject missing because it is borrowing it from the first one. When you need a new subject, move on to the next paragraph.

So many other variations based on this handful of laws have presented themselves to me, and I think there is something to this form that does not have to be based on the audial qualities of a language.

You see, I have always felt that poetry was not universal. This is another story, as they say, but the kernel here is that I wondered why poetry had to belong to a single language or culture. It became a banner for nationalism, not humanity! So, I went on an adventure, seeking out an answer to this. There had been prose translations of poetry for centuries. And of course, there were the inroads that prose poetry had been making for at least a couple of hundred years. (I have a theory, and it holds that the very first poetry had no lines with which to swing on; it was simply the language of speech.) Why did poetry need to find its way into some verse? Why not write it in the rules of prose?

I’m back from my adventure with not as many solutions to my puzzles as I would have liked. And I have been tinkering with the artifacts I did manage to find, and it has been engrossing. I found that poetry does not need to contemplate the single file of themes it has in recent centuries (like love and death and youth and such) because it could be about any human interest, including abstractions like patterns and numerical fantasies, and it could even be about the form of the poem, which can take qualities outside that of lines.

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A Trial of Random Sequences

21 August 2020 by Rey Armenteros

I was thinking about this because I was reading Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire. Neil Gaiman wrote in the introduction that Moore quoted someone else when he said that you can start anywhere in a circle. His novel was supposed to be seen as a circular path, I suppose where you could take the end and connect it to the beginning and make a ring out of the line of the story. Gaiman even suggested starting the book wherever you like and then wrapping back to the beginning to finish whatever you had left out.

I was momentarily fascinated by this idea, and it brought to mind sequences of numbers. When I cast for a sequence of numbers, I think about what is random. I have used the 312 pattern before, believing it to be random, and reading Moore’s novel as prescribed by Gaiman would be similar with 231 — starting the novel in the middle and then going back to the beginning. The difference with my 312 is that you’re staring the novel toward the end rather than the middle.

I have to distinguish the meaning of random. It does not mean for me the casting of dice or something similar to get any number that was not provided by voluntary choice. It means the implication that a set of numbers is random because they lack a pattern. In essence, it is an artifice.

So, I realized that you really can’t get a random distribution with just a sequence of three numbers, because they can still imply associations.

A sequence needs at least two numbers. Two numbers can only give you 12 or 21, which implies forward or backward, and there’s nothing random about that. Three numbers gives you 123 and 321, which have the same problem as 12 and 21. As I mentioned, 312 and 231 also create a logic, with you starting somewhere in the middle and then finishing off the earlier parts. That leaves 213 and 132, and the problem I have with them is that one of the numbers remains in its own spot; 3 is in its proper spot in 213, and 1 is in its spot in 132.

Maybe four numbers are needed then. 1234 and 4321 are out for the reasons already established. 2341, 3412, and 4123 are also out because they give us a sequence that begin from somewhere in the middle and move toward the end and then wrap around to finish the rest. Of what’s left over, anything that starts with 1 (such as, 1342, 1423, 1432, 1324, 1243, 1342), have the problem of having at least one number falling in its proper place, and we can also preclude the ones that do it for 2, 3, and 4 (4231, 4132, 2431, 2134, 2314, 3124, 3214, 3241). That leaves a few possibilities that do not have these patterns. But when I look at 4213 and 2413, the implication shows that even numbers are grouped at the start, and with 3142, the odd numbers are at the start. 4312 has the odd numbers in the middle, framed by even numbers, and 3421 has the opposite results. That leaves 2143, and I have to say, if I can see one flaw in this combination of these numbers, it is that the evens are in the odd places, and the odds are in the evens. So, I feel it is impossible to display a random line of numbers without any implied meaning unless I make the sequence larger.

I think five numbers might do it. We already know some of the problems against a random implication, so I won’t bother listing dozens of numbers. I will fish for a number and see if there is anything wrong with it. 34251 might be the answer, and there might be more than one answer to this when using five numbers. It has none of the issues that we have described, but I have a feeling that if we stare at it long enough, a problem will arise, because patterns present themselves when new facets occur to us. After looking for a minute, I actually recognize something that does not bother me as much as the above qualities, and yet it makes me wonder if there isn’t something better. The pattern I found is that you start in the middle and continue a line going backward and forward to the next available number until you run out of numbers. From 3 (the middle), you go back to 4 and then forward to 2, and then back to 5 and then forward to 1. There has to be a better possibility.

25413 feels like it can cover the problem. It looks random, and I cannot demystify it into a pattern with my normal modes of interest. I haven’t looked deeply into the possibilities with a five-number sequence and feel there might be a couple of others.

This makes me think that what interest an artist has with numbers has nothing to do with all possibilities, as it might in math. It has to do with the right number for the right job. It has to be an exact number fulfillment or the work falls apart.

It also makes me think about how the appearance of a random number is anything but random. If it were truly, random, any number would do. You would just blindly pick one from a lineup of available numbers. To an artist, random is the absence of pattern that would intimate some form of meaning. When an artist is talking random, they are talking about the implication of random and not the actual phenomenon.

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Filling Out Forms

17 July 2020 by Rey Armenteros

Charles Simic was the one I wanted to become my favorite poet. But I couldn’t for reasons I can’t get into. But then, the question would be who could be a valid candidate for a favorite poet?

This was not the thing on my mind when someone went up to my seven-year-old daughter and asked her about the book by Italo Calvino I had left on the table. I was witnessing this in my periphery because I was busy filling out a form. I could see my daughter pointing at me, and the lady approaching me. Point blank, she asked me if I was reading Italo Calvino. It’s not a question you normally get asked. I looked up from the form and thought about it. Italo Calvino didn’t just show up on that table one day. There was a progression to this. I started my answer by mentioning my quest for prose poetry. I brought up the first anthology of prose poems I had read. Then I said that led me to other anthology books. I kept taking looks over at the book where my daughter had already picked up her name badge, as if the book were the object that represented the accolades at the end of such a journey. I was conscious that my daughter’s dance recital was about to start, and I really had to finish this form.

The whole time I was explaining the book, the lady was nodding her head because she knew Calvino, and as a literature teacher, she was expressing amazement that anyone would even bother, practically praising me for doing such a thing.

Still conscious of the one or two minutes left to me, I continued. I didn’t know who I was talking to, but I thought it was prudent of me to bring up the third prose poetry anthology from which Calvino’s selection came, where I first encountered his work. I had known his name before, but it was thanks to this anthology that I could place a voice to the face. Six poems from his Invisible Cities were in the anthology, and the lady let me know she was aware of this book too. My daughter was waiting for me to finish filling out the form so that we could go in already because her audition was about to start. I was juggling all this in my head, simultaneously thinking about my address and other contact information for the form. Undeterred, I was plumbing through the recollected steps of my poetic journey, mesmerized by how I was answering about information I had always thought about but had never voiced. But then, she asked me who my favorite poet was, and I was nonplussed. I had no answer.

At that moment, one of the dance school teachers came out and told me it was time! Once I got inside, there was no time for poetry, and I had lost track of the lady.

She was obviously one of the mothers at the dance studio, but I had never seen her before. Even so, after our conversation, I was confident I’d see her again to continue this fascinating topic. In preparation for the second part to our conversation, I thought about her question, because it only made sense that you would have a favorite poet. I read Charles Simic the most, and I thought he was the natural answer. The problem was that the more I read him, the more I discovered we were not in step to the same rhythm. I was a different kind of reader than the type he was writing to, I thought. The more I read him, the more it seemed obvious he was not writing to anyone, actually.

Calvino could have been a contender. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler was the book the lady had found on the table, and I recall telling her that it was getting borderline annoying. I enjoyed the premise of the book, but the problem I had with it was also tied to the premise. The book was about how a reader (a generic reader who becomes an actual character in the book) starts reading a book but then, for various ludicrous reasons, cannot finish it as he starts the beginnings of other books. It was annoying in the manner that Calvino kept finding another outlandish reason why the next book and the next book could not be finished either. As it turned out, regardless of my annoyance, I finished that book a few days after the audition, and I found it was so well-written, that I pardoned this small slip and ended up loving the book as a clever piece of reasoning. But I probably would not include Calvino as a favorite poet because very little of what I have read of his can be classified as poetry.

I was stumped because I had no actual poet to point to and say that that person was my ideal creator. Even though as an artist, I don’t have a favorite painter, I was convinced I needed to have an answer ready for the next time I encounter the lady.

There was another angle to this. Having this brief dialogue with the lady at the audition reminded me that I needed to interact more with my fellow writers. I wanted to become a member of some writing club that knew about luminaries like Simic and Calvino. Having a literary instructor in the dance studio meant connections. The next opportunity for a casual conversation, I was going to ask her if she knew of any literary or poertry group.

That was when it occurred to me that I couldn’t recall what the lady looked like. Every time I went to the dance studio after that, I was very aware of the possibility that I could be walking right past her without saying a thing. She never approached me again, and I wondered if it were because she thought I was snubbing her.

My plans for belonging to a writing society were fizzling. Then, a few weeks after the audition, we got quarantined with the pandemic. It was fate, as I was starting to read it in the cards. At home now with plenty of time to read and assess, I can go back to the question of who is my favorite poet, and I have yet to come up with anything. I go back to Charles Simic and read and read the same poems to see if I still have a chance of fitting him into this ideal. It has to be in there somewhere.

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