186 The Writing Experiment
afternoon in the penultimate sentence, the afternoon of the day the father
reappears? The subject position also continually changes, from she, to I, to
you, so that there is no unified subject or agent of the passage, and no
stable narrative position from which to view events. So the ‘she’ who takes
the cuttings may be the child’s mother, but this is not spelt out clearly. The
passage consists of a cluster of impressions that are both independent
from each other, and yet resonate together. It conveys the impressions, per-
ceptions and emotions that make up a life rather than its chronological,
spatial or logical ordering. As such it captures extremely well the disor-
dered process of remembering, and the way that memories are always
being reinvented in the present.
Write a poem, or series of poems, using the new sentence (Exercise 2g).
If you find this difficult to do, you might want to use some of the tech-
niques mentioned in the discontinuity section. For more about the new
sentence see The New Sentence (Silliman 1987), and The Marginalization of
Poetry (Perelman 1996, pp. 59–78).
CONCLUSION
Poetry and prose, then, are always intimately linked in experimental
writing, which seeks to break up the norms of both poetry and narrative.
In fact Lyn Hejinian’s My Life draws us back again to the issue of repre-
sentation first raised in Chapter 2, and reiterated time and again in
different forms in this book. My Life is a more radical challenge to realist
representation than the surreal and satirical rewritings in Chapter 2,
because it challenges normal time–space relations, a cohesive subject posi-
tion, and narrative linearity all at once.
More generally, this chapter has explored the varied terrain of post-
modern poetry, and avant-garde poetics, to challenge both the lyric and
free-verse traditions. We have built on the strategies for playing with
language we encountered in the first two chapters, extended their range,
and given them a political and literary context within contemporary
experimental poetry movements. These strategies can be incorporated by
you to varying degrees: a very small amount of linguistic experimentation
goes a long way and may have far-reaching effects in your work. Such
linguistic strategies can also be combined with performance and digital
writing (see Chapters 10 and 11) to produce other contemporary forms
of textuality.