After reading an interview with poet D.A. Powell, and then drinking with a genre theorist (God bless Seattle!), I’ve been thinking about what the page does to our words. Powell made me feel like a chump when he spoke about his students producing poems that were written to fit the page, and not vice versa. The lines in their poems, he realized, ended where they did because of where the page stopped. So he embarked on a series of experiments, encouraging his students to write on unorthodox surfaces, such as toilet paper rolls and candles, with the revolutionary goal of “subverting the page.” Maybe this is why everybody lines up to see Kerouac’s On the Road scroll? Anyway, Powell himself had a breakthrough when he turned a legal pad sideways, and on it composed the first poem of his elegaic collection, Tea. In those poems, many of which mark the deaths of his friends from AIDS and his own struggle with the disease, Powell found that “by pulling the line longer, stretching it into a longer breath, I was giving a little bit more life to some people who had very short lives.”
Already I was looking around the house for my widest sheet of paper. But in my search I found an article I’d torn from the 10/5/08 NY Times Book Review by Steven Millhauser comparing the ambition of the short story to that of the novel. Arguing that the [Blake’s-grain-of-sand] short story in its brevity aims for more than the [whole-world] novel can achieve (an argument which I, an ever-ambitious poet, blithely transferred to the dwarf of poetry vs. the hulk of prose), Millhauser writes:
If you concentrate your attention on some apparently insignificant portion of the world, you will find, deep within it, nothing less than the world itself. In that single grain of sand lies the beach that contains the grain of sand. In that single grain of sand lies the ocean that dashes against the beach, the ship that sails the ocean, the sun that shines down on the ship, the interstellar winds, a teaspoon in Kansas, the structure of the universe. And there you have the ambition of the short story, the terrible ambition that lies behind its fraudulent modesty: to body forth the whole world.[…The short story] exults in its shortness. It wants to be shorter still. It wants to be a single word. If it could find that word, if it could utter that syllable, the entire universe would blaze up out of it with a roar.”
Fewer words! Shorter lines! His article invigorated me, but, as it’s sat on my desk for the last few months, hasn’t actually changed anything in the way I write. Maybe as writers we each find first our voice, our breath, and then the reasons for it. Powell, if I’m reading him right, didn’t really understand the necessity of his longer lines until after he’d started writing them. I appreciate Powell’s attention to the tyranny of the page, and it reminds me of Linda Gregerson’s insistence on writing within the unit of the line, rather than breaking a poem into lines. For me, the pressure of the approaching margin is a fruitful limitation, a sort of cheap syllabics. I fit the page, mostly. So before I throw pages to the wind, I’d like to find out more about the history of the standard page, how its width was chosen to fit our breath and our hands and our machines, though, as in Powell’s case, it doesn’t always. Of course, when I tried to look into this history online, the only page whose history I could find was the webpage.