Metagraphs

Would Guy Debord consider Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School a metagraph? I did a google search for metagraph, a term that Debord brackets as [poem-collage], and found nothing about poetry or collage. I'm going to use the term anyway. If Acker's book is not a poem-collage, then what is it? Well I know it is certainly a form of writing I would love to try sometime.

But maybe I am already trying to 'write' collages. I have found that all I want to do is 'write' metagraphs, whether it be in the form of the live web spinna performance (where I suppose this technique is implied) or a poem I have to write for my traditional creative writing workshop (maybe its implied here too!) Today I met with the professor of my workshop about the direction my poetry should go for my thesis. My problem is, I have so many different projects that I am working on all at once, that I can't seem to focus on one. He suggested that rather than picking a project, I should orchestrate them all into one. The more he continued explaining what he thought I should do, the more I realized that what he was suggesting was that I remix my projects in order to fuse them together. My favorite part of this exchange was that he danced around the idea a little bit and he said he was worried that I might not like what he was going to tell me. Obviously the suggestion was quite the opposite (it was very exciting!), and I am beginning to realize that I use the same strategies and impulses that I use to write and edit a poem as I do when I sit down to remix something. So how different can it really be? Remix is like a permission slip to simultaneously fail, play, create, destroy, rethink, plagiarize and resurrect. I have found remix as a technique artistically very freeing.

To switch gears slightly, I wanted to talk briefly about my experience with the web spinna performance before I end this since no one seemed to want to speak up about it at the end of last class. The whole process really surprised me. First, I was surprised that I could actually come up with something that was at least mildly pleasing in spite of my nonexistent musical background; second, I was surprised at how nervous I was before the performance, my hand was shaking on the mouse at the beginning of it; third, the consistency of tone (both thematically and sonically) of the class performance as a whole was really incredible to me. During our discussion on Acker, we talked a little bit about our minds and how as meaning making machines they attempt to make associations, narratives and sense out of what they are presented with then fill in the gaps accordingly. It is possible of course that the consistency I observed was just that, my brain creating the patterns out of the performance, but of that I am not yet convinced- and I don't know if there is any way to know for sure. Or if it even matters...