Monday, February 7, 2011

"writing in terms of discovery"

Reading "in terms of discovery" has brought me back, serendipitously, to Gertrude Stein but this time I will not just ingest her words and marvel once again at how she continues to connect me to what matters in matters of writing but voice it to the virtual void.

Rediscovering my copy of Jan Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy (University of Toronto 1992)thickly flagged with post-it notes and my own pencilled annotations by way of maintaining my ongoing dialogue with the book, I found this reference by Zwicky on page 171:

"John Hyde Preston, about Gertrude Stein:

She talks freely and volubly and sometimes obscurely, as if she had something there that she was very sure of and yet could not touch it. She has that air of having seen in flashes something which she does not know the shape of, and can talk about, not out of the flashes but out of the space between when she has waited."

This is cited from Preston's essay, "A Conversation" from The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 156, No. 2 (August 1935). Searching the internet in hopes of finding the entire piece archived, the first item I come across is from Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science by Steven Meyer. In his Prefatory Remarks he mentions Preston's conversation with Stein,

"shortly after she concluded her six-month lecture tour of the United States in 1934 and 1935, Gertrude Stein responded to Preston's confession of just how "miserable, despairing, self-doubtful" he still felt about his writing. Drawing on half a century’s experience in her chosen medium, she counseled him to write
without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. Yes, before in a thought, but not in careful thinking. It will come if it is there and if you will let it come, and if you have anything you will get a sudden creative recognition. You won't know how it was, even what it is, but it will be creation if it came out of the pen and out of you and not out of an architectural drawing of the thing you are doing." (p. 188, online version, )."

Meyer's book is one that I bought in my book hunt for ever more writing responding to Stein and her peculiar genius.

Now the chain from Stein's response to Preston as contained in his essay 76 years ago surfacing in Meyer's book in the 2001 paperback and earlier recorded also in Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy reaches me on this snow-heavy day with striking relevance to a recent workshop with Gail Scott at the Toronto New School of Writing.

Now I know how to proceed, what to send to Gail in response to her brilliant but all-too-brief hours with us, as a profound "thank you" for what has emerged for me, through Scott, as a Steinian continuum and a way of continuing.

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