there are ants; and they invade with a fury that time does not
diminish. Theirs is the task of reclamation, to reclaim the piles from
the wells and the wells from the piles. All around the horizon is
rising and falling as if beneath a tumultuous wind. But the air is still;
the sky hovers.there is a girl; and her determination matches the ants’. She is a
cartographer; and has a love for maps, for pale blue grids, for curving
tendril lines that denote and describe. In this changeable landscape
her mapping tools lie closeted, her pale grid empty.there is a world; and the girl must still this world.And so she kneels,
patiently, gently lifting each ant between forefinger and thumb.
Beside her is a little perspex farm, ready and filled with dirt. It is
empty. On her other side is a little ant pile, growing higher with little
mangled ant bodies. She sighs and frowns as she works, releasing
slow and single tears.there is a world; and in this world a little girl. It is a lumpish round
world with a skittish sky. It is a world with an empty map, a pile of
ants, and a well filled with solemn tears.‘A World, A Girl, A Memory: act one’ (Gerrard 1999, p. 59)This piece is ostensibly based on an incident about a girl playing with soil
and insects. But Isabelle does not use a progressive or narrative structure.
Rather she dislocates and fractures the incident and then restructures it.
That way she makes us focus on one element at a time, using a varying
structure as her basis. An effect of this is to reduce the representational
aspect of the scenario, and strongly emphasise the symbolic and ritualistic
elements.
Simultaneity
Some kinds of structure allow several things to happen at once, rather like a
number of people talking at the same time. I call these simultaneous struc-
tures (Exercise 1d). One type of simultaneous structure consists of two or
more vertical columns on the page, so that there is a continual choice about
whether to read across or down. This exercise is both stimulating and fun,
and leads to many different meanings jostling together at once.
A simultaneous structure is usually most successful when the piece
reads well both horizontally and vertically. The poem should acquire
Working out with structures 55