Highly adaptable poetic processes, free to all those who desire them

Sarah Dawson

Figure 1: Close-up of drawing from expecting a different result by Sarah Dawson, pencil on paper, original 30cm by 42cm (2020)

In memory of Frank Auerbach.

‘the paper has been erased so often that it has completely given way and had to be patched. (…) the final image is the summation of the many rejected attempts that made it possible.’

Isabel Carlisle introducing Frank Auerbach’s drawings [1].

My mother and I had a very strong negative reaction to some sculptures we saw recently. We spoke about how much we disliked the sculptures when we encountered them. Once we’d retuned to our respective homes, we spoke on the phone and reaffirmed our mutual distaste. Our problem with these sculptures was that they wanted us to behave in a particular way. The sculptures were three-dimensional imperatives, telling us how to engage with our present environment. An arrangement of wooden manifestos, their primary colours projected their utopian vision through gaps in the foliage. This utopian vision required our participation to be realised. Since nobody was watching, we refused to fulfil the artists’ desires.

Refusal is usually not so easy. Outside of my creative life, my compulsion is not to refuse but to work out what every person I interact with wants, whether they have stated it or not, and provide it to them.

What tasks might this manager want me to do that they haven’t actually mentioned? I should get those tasks done before I receive an email instructing me to do them because the instruction might be harshly worded and imply that I shouldn’t have to be told.

This person has asked me what I want for dinner so I need to guess what they want and make them believe it’s what I want.

Might anybody else want this space I’m taking up? I should vacate it before they are faced with the awkwardness of having to approach me and ask for it.

Consistently fulfilling others’ unstated desires is, in fact, not possible. Attempting to do so can lead to a wide range of psychosomatic anxiety illnesses. I pursue this impossible ambition because I am a thirty-nine-year-old autistic woman with a history of displeasing managers and colleagues. Maybe, if I can develop a sixth sense for what people want, I will stop spreading displeasure around the open-plan office? However, my people-pleasing impulse is countered by a frequent compulsion to refuse. So, I seek out spaces in which I might refuse or at least subvert some of the desires that I sense are projected onto me.

The world of the arts is a ridiculous place for me to seek such freedom, as a viewer/reader/listener/audience member and as a practitioner. At poetry readings, you sit on your uncomfortable chair and try not to make any noise and in art galleries you avoid the invisible beams that trigger high-pitched alarms when you lean too close to a sculpture. As a practitioner, you doctor your work in response to the stipulations of the open call for poetry manuscripts, according to whatever aesthetic preferences you think the editor might have. Your activities always take place in relation to the real or imagined desires of arts administrators. But the desires placed upon us as creative practitioners are not quite the same as the demands that are made of us in other facets of our lives. They can be negotiated with a degree of creativity. The decision-making panel might not know what they want until they watch my hand failing to trace a letterform over and over and over and imagine their own hands holding the pencil, gauging the right amount of pressure.

I want to write about how a creative process can be an artwork in itself. An artist can run her hands over the components of an everyday process and can come to understand how it operates. Then, she can imagine how the process might operate differently and remake it within a creative setting.

Can I turn your attention towards linguistic processes? Can I encourage you to think about how you compose and vocalise a response, how you fill out an online form, how you sign your name? Can I ask you to imagine how you might do these things differently?

As I begin to articulate my methodologies, I fear that I am putting more wants and desires out into the world for others to negotiate. (The worst thing I could possibly imagine would be an “autistic poetics”, which every autistic person who ever writes poetry will have to subscribe to or else justify their dissent.) I will not state my desires as boldly as the instructional sculptures that troubled my mother and I or as the facilitator of a participatory art project that requires you to touch strangers or as the kind of manifesto which claims that one particular way of making art is the most radical, revolutionary, relevant to our times, etc. But even though I have formatted this manifesto as a personal essay and included little anecdotes about my anxiety, even though I will try to express my preferred methods of making poetry as possibilities you might take up, you will detect my desire underneath this softened language. You will sense that I think poetry that foregrounds process is more valuable than other types of poetry.

I cannot deny my desire to perceive processes, especially the processes involved in language and communication. I desire to know what your hands have been up to, what they have grasped and let slip, what marks they have made and erased. I desire language as it breaches the boundary of the self and stutters out into society. I want to watch as your cognitive and articulatory processes overtake one another, tripping each other up. I think about the act of interjecting – the way in which internal disagreement prompts the intake of breath and the sounding of language against the other. I think about our interminable attempts to affect the world with language: to disagree, to celebrate, to console, to explain, to request. I don’t want exceptional language; I want interminable language. (I’m about to delete several paragraphs of interminable language that were the by-product of this exceptional language because I can’t find a way to convince you of the value of interminable language without resorting to exceptional language).

I have, of course, been taught that poetry is exceptional language, crystalised into forms that reinforce semantic content. Coleridge’s characterisation of poetry as ‘the best words in the best order’ still underlies much contemporary poetic culture. Evening courses, submission guidelines and enthusiastic social media users encourage you to polish, refine, to sharpen your poems, to whip them into shape or words to that effect. The poem achieves its final form and is reproduced digitally and in print. Its lucidity surpasses any utterance that might be voiced by a spontaneous speaker. You might allude to the hours of polishing that led to your work finally getting accepted by Top Tier Poetry Magazine, perhaps underneath your Instagram post or in your extemporaneous comments before reading the poem in public. But the process is not to be seen in public, because it isn’t the work. The work is the polished poem. I am acutely aware that much of my work does not fulfil these desires because I follow my own desire for interminable language above the outside desire for exceptional language.

It was only by stepping away from poetry that I was able to embrace the interminable and eventually assert that poetry could be interminable too. In 2001, my mother watched a TV programme about the painter Frank Auerbach and suggested that we might go to his retrospective at the Royal Academy. Neither of us were familiar with this kind of outing (and looking back it must have been a huge expense for my mother) but the idea activated some kind of desire in both of us so we headed off to Leatherhead train station to buy our London Travelcards. I was fifteen and spent a lot of my paper round money on Salvador Dali posters. I encountered art in the form of glossy reproductions in coffee table books that I browsed through in Waterstones. I used the abstract images as an aid for meditation or I allowed the strange figures and landscapes to activate my imagination. It had not occurred to me that the work artists had done to produce these images might be meaningful in itself.

Encountering Auerbach’s paintings and drawings immediately required me to improvise new ways of looking at art. The qualities of the artworks could only be described with verbs: slathered, scraped, spread, erased, marked, pressed. There were figurative elements - heads, bodies and places - but it was not possible to perceive these separately from the labour of their construction. The paratext around the works confirmed the overall impression of effort and described the context in which Auerbach had sculpted these representations. I learned that Auerbach’s sitters were his friends and lovers and that the sessions in which he would build up and scrape back the paint, sometimes over a period of years, took place in the context of these intimate relationships. Similarly, his landscapes documented his long relationship with the small area around Camden Town in which he lived and worked. This interminable application and removal of paint, these attempts to grasp the properties of people and places, must surely have affected the relationship between artist and subject, which would affect the work, which would affect the relationship between artist and subject. Artistic processes and everyday life could be intertwined and some of this interaction might be perceptible to those who encountered your work.

I did not know that process was what I desired before I entered this exhibition – it was the work itself which provoked my desire. I wanted to feel the weight of the oil paint as I steered it across the canvas with my palette knife. My desires grew as I encountered other manifestations of process, initially within the visual arts and eventually in literature.

It took me a long time to establish the centrality of process in my own work and to stand by it, perhaps because process in literature is made evident in subtler ways than process in the visual arts. The significance of process is easy to understand when you’re looking at a painting or a drawing that is made up of marks that were clearly placed by a human hand. Less easy to understand when you are looking at a typeset poem printed on a white page.

I think it first occurred to me that poems might preserve some trace of their composition when I was taking an evening course with UK poet Steve Fowler, about a decade ago. I had been writing poetry for a few years at this point: poems that purported to be about witches, sea creatures, brutalist architecture and other such mainstays of the communal poetic image bank but were actually about other things I wasn’t comfortable writing about. These poems didn’t have anything to do with the way I used language in my everyday life – the ways I was trying and failing to use language to convey my value as an employee. I was never satisfied with the sea creature poems. What Steve generously offered to me was a sampler of poetries that could be loosely categorised as ‘experimental’: sound poetry, the British Poetry Revival, concrete poetry, Noigrandres, Oulipo, CoBrA… Amongst these poetries, I started to locate tangible evidence of the poet’s struggle with language. Sometimes this evidence was physical – I could tell how much pressure had been placed on a typewriter key or could see that a handwritten word had been crossed out. But I was also interested in how a particular Oulipo constraint could be revealed by the resulting poem.

The Oulipo group of writers and mathematicians, operating from 1960 to the present day, develops constraints that are designed to generate new writing. Their constraints are commonly taught to creative writing students in order to shake them out of their habitual processes. If, for example, you are set the challenge of writing a text that doesn’t include the letter E, this constraint (the lipogram) will force you to think of words that you would not otherwise have used, sending you off in unexpected directions.

The particular constraint that captured my imagination was the snowball – a poem in which each subsequent word is one letter longer than the last. Except, I instinctively felt that the process should be reversed so that the sequence of words would dwindle down to whatever I could communicate with a single letter. And I thought that multiple reverse snowballs could form a longer poem but I started to lose track of how many letters I was on so I started composing the poems in Excel with a column for each length of word. And then I started to cheat a bit, leaving the six-letter word column blank and skipping straight to five.

My desire to perceive process had expanded into a desire to devise processes that would confront me with new difficulties and possibilities. I don’t want to share these poems now but looking back on them almost a decade later the language evokes my struggle with the constraints I devised. Even if the poems were taken out of the Excel documents that I composed them in and pasted as plain text, the misspellings, words shunted together and awkward word choices would all speak to the process of composition. I had discovered that evidence of process did not have to consist of handmade marks but could be found in a sequence of typed words. Nevertheless, I was still drawn to various hand processes, especially asemic writing (marks that have some of the characteristics of written language but do not conform to any alphabet). I played around with asemic sheet music, sometimes sewing marks onto the paper. This activity pleased me – I was investigating what I could do (and what I couldn’t do) with language, with my body and with my cognitive faculties. Furthermore, I was making my investigations tangible to others.

I was aware that my new work was subject to new desires and still felt compelled to make work that appealed to particular editors, event organisers and so on. Perhaps the aesthetics of experimental poetry were simply more compatible with my own desires than other desires I had been subject to in the past. But it wasn’t just that – I felt that by devising new processes and variations on existing processes, I was sometimes activating new desires, in the same way that my first encounter with Frank Auerbach’s paintings had activated my own desires. I believe that witnessing process has an exceptional ability to activate desire because the witness of the process imaginatively performs the process themselves. This phenomenon is especially evident at poetry events, where the poet has the opportunity to work through processes in real time, allowing us to see and hear how they compose, vocalise or even hand write or type language. Say I watch a performance by Nathan Walker and they are interpreting a visual score as a series of vocalisations. I think about how their vocalisations are determined in the moment of the performance and whether I could cope with this lack of control, whether I might even desire it. When I later began using improvisation in my performances, I wanted audiences to see that I was responding to other sources of language. See, you don’t have to reach inwards, you can speak back to language that excites or troubles you. Imagine how you might alter the process I am using to suit your own concerns.

It should be clear that my focus on process is not a disavowal of identity and that the processes I devise and my usage of them reflect the particularities of my body and my experiences. Since my first introduction to the richness of process was an encounter with Auerbach’s paintings, I have always understood process as intensely intimate. Following a process does not erase the self because an individual person has to devise and carry out the process. Even a computer programme that generates poems must be designed by a human being with previous experiences, abilities, inabilities and aesthetic values. When we focus our attention on doing, the being can start to blur, but she is still present.

You are watching a woman who is trying to sync her speech up with an audio recording. Her intonation becomes more dynamic when she reaches sections of the recording that she remembers well. When she struggles to speak in time with the recording, she closes her eyes. Does this demonstrate a universal connection between recalling language and closing the eyes or is this a peculiarity of this particular woman?

You see a woman speaking in response to audio that she listens to through headphones. Her utterances are all questions which prompts you to speculate about what instructions she might be questioning. You perceive the difficulty of listening and formulating questions at the same time – you don’t think you would be able to do this. You notice that the woman often queries instructions to perform movements that she claims will make her dizzy which implies some sort of issue with her balance or blood pressure.

Now the woman is repeating a phrase over and over with one word changed each time. She has an audio device which plays back previous iterations of the phrase into the room and re-records them, accumulating feedback. She has to press the correct buttons each time and listen for the end of the previous recordings before she adds her altered phrase. The new words that she selects reflect her preoccupations with nature, toxicity and risk.

The woman has finally listened to ‘I am sitting in a room’ by Alvin Lucier, which she has been aware of as a concept for many years. She knew that ‘I am sitting in a room’ was an audio recording in which Lucier continually played back and re-recorded a simple recording of his own voice. She had read that the sound of the room overwhelmed Lucier’s voice after a certain number of iterations. This was an interesting concept, but she did not feel the need to actually listen to the piece. When she eventually listened, she was interested in Lucier’s description of the process ‘as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have’. This, she found out, was a reference to his stutter. The process was now resonant with awareness of the vocal self and the offer of self-effacement.

The woman is focussed on completing her task and does not speak about her personal attributes. Nevertheless, she appears in front of you as a self who is similar to and different from other selves.

Calls for submission that seek work from marginalised artists often assume that narrative and representation are the primary means through which our experiences are explored and evoked, regardless of the medium we work in. Call outs that welcome all artistic forms often request queer stories, neurodiverse stories, and so on. I am autistic and queer, but I prickle at the phrasing and the assumptions it contains about the work I make. Maybe this is just lazy copy writing from arts orgs who have absorbed the ‘marginalised group stories’ framing without ever really thinking about it?

I should also explain that I’m not against poetry that conveys an anecdote or a scene or an image or against narrative. In fact, I wonder if process can constitute a kind of narrative. Can a palette knife scraping paint residue from a canvas be a short story? When I add another line of handwritten loops to a visual poem, carefully hovering above the page to avoid smudging my existing work, is this not a sort of experimental thriller? I think that processes are stories or perhaps loose outlines of stories that can be inhabited by different narrators, each retelling the process in their own style. As another narrator takes up my handwriting process, they might find that certain components of the process suit their hand whilst others require modification. Perhaps this encounter with process is another narrative: a story about process.

Here is another narrative about process. My mother likes to tell a story about a health visitor who checked up on me when I was around two years old. The health visitor asked me to do some basic tasks, one of which was to draw a picture of my daddy. Apparently, I refused to do this because I did not understand why it was necessary. Who was this woman and why did she need to know what my daddy looked like? My mother thought that my defiance of the health visitor was very funny and supported my refusal.

I wish that I could remember this refusal rather than accessing it via my mother’s memory. She tells me that my refusal was successful – I was listened to, I was not forced to draw a picture of my daddy and this did not lead to any repercussions. I would love to know what words I used to make such a powerful refusal as a confused autistic child. This original refusal resonates through all of my subsequent compliances and refusals. I consider how I could bring this process of refusal into my creative practice, attempting different methods of refusal and measuring their affects.

The first poetic processes I devised allowed me to investigate what I could do with language: how far could I distort or reduce it, and what forms could I cram it into? However, these experiments were a long way removed from my everyday linguistic activities. I needed to take a letterform loop and tie my everyday and creative processes together.

In 2018, I was in the process of mourning my mother’s mother. I had acquired her 2017 week-to-view diary, which she had used to keep track of appointments, anniversaries and details she wanted to remember. My granny’s process began each year when she carried through the significant dates from earlier years, which included her late mother’s birthday, the date she had given up smoking and a date when she had been in a minor car crash many years ago. Her slanted lines lacked many of the characteristics that usually identify letters of the alphabet – G and I were almost identical, an e was a slight turn in the thread and n could barely lift itself off the ground. She had kept these diaries since at least the early 1970s and could convey her judgement and humour in the most economical scribble. My mother and I both keep very similar diaries now, following our process, recording our appointments, our to-dos, our medications, our health problems.

My granny was the first person I had really needed to mourn and I had no protocol to follow. I used everything I knew about creative processes to devise the mourning process I needed. I knew to start with a process which was central to my granny’s life and also resonated with my own life. I immediately thought of the diaries, which my mother was happy to pass over to me. I started to copy my granny’s handwriting, focussing on her most distinctive letter shapes. I needed to follow these lines for a while, veering off, acknowledging my progressive distortion of her forms, trying to get back on track and failing. From within the process, I saw that the letters had hooks that wanted to link together and form a written fabric. As I continued to write, I looked down at a textile of process - an artefact I could return to if the need for mourning recurred. Through this process, I was mourning and I was creating art, I was doing both of these things completely at the same time without compromise to either.

In the story, the woman finds a diary, but seems strangely unconcerned by the events alluded to within. She also refuses to describe the appearance of the diary writer, although her brief summaries of diary entries convey something of its author’s character. The woman’s focus is the process of writing by hand in a diary. When she attempts to copy the diary writer’s exact letterforms, she is imitating her movements, the incremental gestures that make up an individual writing process. You sense that the woman performs this imitation in an attempt to attain closeness with the diary writer. As her attempts to imitate fail and her fabric of copied letterforms warps and falls apart, her own identity becomes visibly distinct from the identity of the diary writer.

The woman offers you her process, which is a method of writing a fabric. She is interested in how you might modify her process, perhaps drawing on your own handwriting experiences, to write a new fabric that her hand and her eye could not have written. She apologises for giving you a gift of work to do – she herself hates being given creative tasks to complete, and always refuses.

Reference

[1] Carlisle, I. Lampert, C and Rosenthal, N, (eds). 2001. Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954 – 2001. London: Royal Academy Publications.

Sarah Dawson is a poet who focuses on performance, collaboration and process. Her recent projects include Physical Culture, in which she questions instructions to perform physical movements and Catastrophising, in which she describes the worst possible outcomes of enacting Fluxus event scores. The visual poems composed from copied handwriting which are referred to and pictured in this piece are included in her artist’s book expecting a different result, published by Haverthorn’s Interruptions imprint. A playlist of her performance videos can be watched on YouTube.