David Capps on form, purpose and audience

Wine Glass

You’ve already had too many, but you keep knocking them back, because this is what you’ve been taught: the content of your writing fits the form, like water it assumes the shape of whatever vessel it is poured into. So, different vessels serve different occasions, different expressive needs.

You would not pour beer into a snifter. You would not pour a tall glass of cold milk into a stein. In the same way, you would not (as is so sadly often the case) chop the lines of your prose arbitrarily into stanzas. You would not merge those impactful line breaks to create a block of prose. Oh wait, there’s prose poetry. There’s also the party where at the end of the night drinks mix and mingle and authors raid the cupboards for any glass they can find. And at the end of the night, there is just you. The party has left and you are about to pass out on the couch when you see that someone has left a perfectly filled glass of wine. Its surface tension dances before your eyes break into free verse.

Badger

The editor has conditionally accepted your work, meaning edits, meaning ‘trimming’, as the editor was churned out by an MFA program that has a fascistic, obsessive-compulsive intolerance for ‘small words’.

Especially on the list to be purged are articles and prepositions. Something feels off about it. Then, late at night, you rewatch that same video of the honey badger toying with the lioness, twisting in its thick skin as the predator claws at it to no avail. What if the piece of writing is a like a badger, which needs to be able to rotate in its own skin, the untrimmed form of its prose, in order to tussle with the reader? What if it is even essential to being a badger to have a loose skin? Is the world evolutionarily better off if the sinews of its various voices are lost?

Traffic

On the horrid commute to the megalithic university, there are four lanes of traffic, all hopefully moving in the same direction. Say the lanes are streams of consciousness active at the sentence level.

Then what makes up each stream of consciousness and carries it forward is a particular idea, a car, an SUV, a bus, etc. Perhaps on good days, they are separated by adequate white space. But today is not a good day; they seem locked to each other, bumper to bumper with no end in sight. What does it matter: lightness, compact cars, the maneuverability of a particular idea, if there are too many and you are lost in the rush? If you are lost in the rush, isn’t the reader? But where is the terrain in all this? Now picture that time you were in Ithaka driving a jeep up a country road which got narrower and narrower, how you couldn’t figure out how to find the reverse until a local and his donkey stopped and pointed it out. Not any vehicle could have climbed those hills. Sometimes only the more rarefied ideas can trace out a path, and sometimes there may be no way back.

Infection

One has to have a body in order to experience an infection, it is true. But where does the inner experience of the infection take place? A piece of writing must occur on the page, in lines of poetry (as Mallarmé observed, poems are made of words—are they, or are they communicable translations?);

a temple consists of its pillars, a vase of its glass. But where besides the reader’s mind is the content experienced? If the host should die should the author mind? So long as some sufficient number survives in order to spread the virus, all is well. We aren’t walking cordyceps that tend to zombify their audience, but with any luck, the book launch will have a healthy turnout.

Wound Wood

When you see the large ‘eye’ of an oak, it’s where a branch broke off and decades-long regrowth took over. The branches, moving ever upward, the trunk growing in circumference, had to be moving on without it. Still, the evidence is there, especially in sycamore trees like the ones that line Lincoln Street in New Haven.

The content, if anything, is an event, a trauma, or depending on the incline, a rite of passage. You might think it’s ugly for its slanting bulge, its sloppy asymmetry. But that is to confuse ugliness for idiosyncrasy; and as is the case with the oyster layering nacre over silt, imperfection, it can be compelling, if not beautiful. All the same, to revel in the wood wound of the tree, the chevrons facing downward, would be to overlook the grandeur present in every old growth.

Author

David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of four chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming). His latest work, On the Great Duration of Life, a riff on Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, is available from Schism Neuronics.

Photos by qudrat aha, Hans Veth, Wim van ‘t Einde, CDC, Sash Bo on Unsplash