The Prose Block & The Poet

I've tried to be a prose poet.

Danielle Mitchell defines the prose poem as "a poem written in sentences. It appears as a block of text without line breaks. You could think of a prose poem as a bowl or a box with poetry inside. Despite the look of the prose poem its ultimate goal is to retain its poetic qualities."

I wanted a book out of that phase until another way I started writing proved to be inconsistent with the way I wrote then. Now I don't know how to explain the difference between what I write now, and what I wrote then.

All I know is that most of the writers that inspired me to write that way stopped writing that way too. One of them is Oakland Poet Ben Mirov. Mirov's latest poetry collection is called ghost machines and it was put out by Slope Editions, more recently this year. 

The Bibliography & The Lyric Essay

It's about writing with no intentions whatsoever.

That's what draws me to poetry and the lyric essay. That's what drew me to Poet Maggie Nelson's Bluets. Where a lot of people considered that a lyric essay I've always considered it a collection of anecdotes/prose pieces about things she associates with the color blue.

Dictation & Writing

Does anyone remember Yak Baks?

You can Wikipedia and Google News it all you want, but the simplest way to put it is it's a toy that records and plays back so many seconds of everything you say. Where this isn't necessarily about Yak Baks the idea's always been relevant to me because I think a lot of my writing is dictated. I think a lot of this was said to myself before I wrote it down, and I think that's how a lot of my writing is. 

In an essay The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes,' he says "writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin."

This essay along with many others from The Rustle of Language is where I got the idea of using dictation to write. Ever since, I've always been interested in writers that use dictation.

In Transcriptionist Amy Rowland's essay Dictating a Masterpiece Rowland delves into the history of dictation, beginning with new software used to do it, "More and more writers are using voice recognition software, which is constantly improving and even has an app for the iPhone."

More recently in another article Melissa Broder is noted for dictating her entire essay collection So Sad Today into her iPhone. In the article mentioned before that Rowland says before such innovations came to be other writers like Fyodor Dostoevksy and John Milton dictated some of their most seminal works to their own personal stenographers. 

In an article I found on a dialogue Plato wrote titled Phaedrus the author says, "Socrates makes a case against writing by saying that the words themselves are not a complete representation of knowledge, but rather words are to knowledge as pictures are to their subjects."

Plato, in a way was used by Socrates as a stenographer, because he wrote down everything Socrates said, even though he didn't mean to make him do this. Plato just thought everything Socrates said should be written down and Socrates hated writing.

This is what makes Plato the Yak Bak of Socrates, and Socrates couldn't have cared less because he didn't care about writing. I'm this way with not only myself, but my friends. If I haven't said anything interesting all day on Twitter, I'll listen to other people for something interesting to post, making me the stenographer/Plato to my friends who are the writer/Socrates to my writing. 

"Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes."(Barthes)

The process of finding the tools you need to write; the laptop/the website you're gonna open windows up to as soon as the lid is lifted/the pens/the pencils/the notebook/paper/scraps of paper, this is exactly what devices like the Yak Bak/stenographer eliminate. None of these sentences are being written the way they were originally said, because of everything I had to do to get this laptop open to blogspot. Too many modifications to these sentences were made within that frame of time that wouldn't have had to be if I only had a Yak Bak, or something like a stenographer.

Luckily I have myself. I'm my own Yak Bak, stenographer, or iPhone, because I just write down everything I say