Process

March 2, 2016 By: Walt Hunter

The assignment for this column is “process” or, the writing life. How does interesting and inspiring work come to be?

Past Process

July 15, 2021 By: Walt Hunter

This column for Process is about poetry that tries to make sense of sharing time together as it passes. For that I turn to John Ashbery, about whom I have never been willing or able to write, except in a very brief and unsatisfying conclusion to my first book. I live with several of Ashbery’s poems ricocheting around in my consciousness, along with stray lines by Herbert, Dickinson, McKay, and Rich. The idea of writing something about his poetry is particularly daunting because it carries a lot of emotional weight. More than anything else, the name Ashbery calls to mind the people who shaped and continue to shape what I know or feel about poetry. So when I think about Ashbery, the situation in which I think about his poetry is, almost automatically, a social one.

Tropical Harlem

February 23, 2021 By: Akua Banful

Sitting in my apartment, in parks, and on my roof, I have tried to keep track of the ebb and flow of the seasons in the relentless monotony of a socially distanced New York. Keeping track has been made all the more difficult by the seasonal monotony that my research asks of me—working on a dissertation about literary representations of the tropics has me fixated on heat even when I do not feel it.

Miscasting Identity: Context as Cause

January 7, 2021 By: Janani Ambikapathy

One of the frustrating things about academic writing is the categories set by the institution. These categories slice through histories to abstract people, epochs, and bodies of knowledge from their context and settle them deep into the belly of the institution to be studied as phenomena without cause or provenance.

Movement Literacy

August 31, 2020 By: Patty Argyrides

In his latest work, contemporary choreographer William Forsythe tries to create, in his own words, a “short-term literacy” in his audience. The piece begins without music in order to isolate the individual phrases of movement: “it might be perceived that there has been a subtraction, which would be music. But in fact, dancers being the musical engines behind any dance, their breathing alone causes you to understand the phrase.” [1] The intention is to create a more skilled viewer who is focused on the movements that make up the dance without the distraction of the music. When music and movement come together in a more traditional way in the second act, the audience is, or so is the idea, more literate in what is presented to them: “suddenly, you are able to read.”

Poetry from Afar: Distant Reading, Global Poetics, and the Digital Humanities

June 5, 2020 By: Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu

In the spring of 2019, a new and welcome contact of mine in Ghana sent me a PDF of an anthology he had put together with a number of promising, young African poets. Through conversations with those involved with the making of the anthology, I began to note that these writers and editors are part of my intellectual and creative social-network and members of my living archive. In the days following my reading of the anthology, it struck me that the only reason I was able to have access not only to...

The Aura of Autographs

October 9, 2019 By: Hunter Dukes

Always mornings. Early. And there should be coffee. Breakfast will come later, but the best hours are now—when the world is still blanketed, the mind “puddled in dream melt.” [1] There are particular parameters for the page. The margins must be wide. The font Goudy Old Style or Garamond in a squeeze. Carriage returns between paragraphs. No indentation. I once justified my text; now I like the ragged edges. To write The Names (1982), Don DeLillo had to change his method. He began typing single, numbered paragraphs, each on its own leaf: a microclimate that allowed him to “see a given set of sentences more clearly.” This is a logic that makes sense to me. I learned to write from my mother. She taught me to revise a sentence aloud before putting it into print. To move from breath to inscription can be a mystical practice. The look of letters has long astonished, inviting cryptic explanations. The 22 paths connecting Kabbalah’s Sefirot—emanations of the divine Ein Sof—correspond to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The Latin “A” is an abstracted, phonetic descendant from an Ox hieroglyph. Flip it over and you can still see the creature’s horns: ∀. These ideas are important for the writers I study. They reveal a profound longing—the desire to rekindle a relationship between text and the body, at once archaic and arcane, and to locate the origins of writing in the sensual world.

Writing the Senior Thesis: A Conversation

May 28, 2019 By: Jacquelyn Ardam

In this conversation about Process, Jacquelyn Ardam and her undergraduate advisee, Cole Walsh, demystify the senior thesis. Cole’s thesis, “Mak[ing] Bright the Arrows: Recovering the Political Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” examines the poetry of the underserved Millay, whose work with the sonnet, Cole argues, deploys its “memorable speech” to intervene within the isolationist politics of the United States. Here the two collaborators talk about the marginalization of poets within modernism...

On Not Knowing How to Dance

February 28, 2019 By: Walt Hunter

It’s rare to read an account of the process of learning about a new artform or medium from the beginning. Maybe because, at least for me, it’s hard to remember the first time I read a poem or a novel or saw a painting or heard a piece of music. Or maybe because that experience merges uncomfortably with a non-critical stance of “appreciation,” a word that doesn’t deserve some of the pejorative associations attached to it.

Opening the Book, Part II

January 8, 2019 By: Sarah Dowling

This second batch of writers on the process of finishing their books ranges from meditations on the situatedness of academic writing to blow-by-blow descriptions of the publication process to a call for more inventive and ethical ways of acknowledging one’s scholarly companions. Here you can find writing on the “hard edge of a colonial language,” in Sarah Dowling’s apt description of her work. Helen Rydstrand narrates the difficulty of accepting any work as good enough. Rebecca Colesworthy calls attention to the “not-writing”: the money, time, and resources that condition the long-term development of a book. And Alix Beeston’s “intervallic bridgework” concludes this installment of the Process cluster by pushing the form of the monograph toward a politics of citation.

Opening the Book, Part 1

December 7, 2018 By: Michaela Bronstein

For this two-part installment of Process, I asked eight scholars who had just finished a book—their first or their fourth—to write informally about their experience. Conferences often feature roundtables about writing and publishing, but I thought it might be a good addition to have some personal anecdotes, stories less attached to the mechanics of the industry and more to the quiddities of the book-writing process. A book might arrive as an artifact, but it begins as a dream or a compulsion or a hunch. No review or reading, however generous, does justice to the messiness of the life that seals itself into the final object of the book, as though in anticipation of the spell that may someday release it. The intent here is not so much to demystify as to re-enchant.

A Dialogue in Process

September 23, 2018 By: Johanna Winant

This summer, the modernist scholar Johanna Winant and I found ourselves working on a number of converging projects, from book chapters to essays on Stanley Cavell’s philosophy and Donald Hall’s poetry. Below we reflect on the process of writing together, sharing work, and discovering the kinds of friendship that collaboration makes possible

Process Against Progress

April 26, 2018 By: Walt Hunter

I’m taking over the Process blog from Lesley Wheeler at the moment when I’m nearly finished the process of writing my first book and am waiting for page proofs from the press.

Eroding Partitions: A Conversation with Jahan Ramazani

February 26, 2018 By: Lesley Wheeler

My farewell post for the “Process” column is a brief conversation with Jahan Ramazani, University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, and a scholar whose work I admire greatly and follow closely. He gives serious attention to strong poets who aren’t always read with such insight, as well as leveling powerful arguments about how verse frames identity, feeling, and nation. In short, his labors help me think through scholarly problems and build syllabi...

Seeking Anne Spencer

December 10, 2017 By: Lesley Wheeler

Archival research possesses a hushed glamor. To realize that Marianne Moore carried around the very book you’re holding—or that Langston Hughes rolled that exact piece of paper into his typewriter late one night and yanked out a poem with the ink still damp—is like being visited by a character you thought you’d invented. Such knowledge can change how you think about art, and it certainly changes how you read.

Writer’s (Wood)block

September 18, 2017 By: Olivia Badoi

There is always some degree of confusion when I tell people that I am getting my PhD in English by writing a dissertation about wordless novels. While I’m used to giving my “elevator pitch” to fellow academics, describing my project to people outside of academia can be more of a challenge:

How to Do Things with Poetry Criticism, or Scholarship and Justice, Part II

May 24, 2017 By: Lesley Wheeler

Some writing changes worlds, for better and for worse. The second executive order signed by President Trump, for example, speeds up environmental reviews “For High Priority Infrastructure Projects” such as the Dakota Access Pipeline. The effects of this order on the natural universe and on human culture may be profound.

Processing the Writing Process

April 12, 2017 By: Helen Sword

My process of writing this blog post about the writing process was slow, circuitous, and emotionally fraught. I started out with a clear idea of my overall structure—or so I thought—but ended up abandoning it after several hours of drafting, redrafting, and repeated applications of my Delete key. Frustrated, I tried free-writing for twenty minutes: an unstructured word-dump to find out where “writing to think” might get me. Unfortunately, it got me nowhere. By that time I had already spent...

Scholarship and Justice

January 9, 2017 By: Lesley Wheeler

The U.S. presidential election of 2016 made many professors think harder about teaching toward a better world. My colleagues and friends found the immediate aftermath especially challenging. If, on November 9th, your students were shocked, sleepless, weepy, angry, afraid—how could you console them, or help them channel their responses constructively? If they were pleased by the election, ready to report you if you said something partisan—how should you behave then? There’s a Professor Watchlist...

Teaching/Writing Correspondence, Part I

September 21, 2016 By: Lesley Wheeler

If I were Edna St. Vincent Millay, I might begin this letter by describing some bit of local foliage I’d enclosed, its leaves pressed among scrawled endearments. But by the time broadband has advanced enough to transmit an actual crape myrtle blossom, it would be very faded, I’m afraid. So a photograph from my front yard will have to suffice.

Listening to the Noise

March 2, 2016 By: Lesley Wheeler

In 2015, the airwaves crackled with debate about the value—or pointlessness—of academic conferences (see, for starters, “The Conference Manifesto” and “A Conference Manifesto for the Rest of Us”). Yet I love the Modernist Studies Association meeting for reliably reenergizing my research and writing. Come November, I’m generally buried under a drift of student essays, plus the holidays are looming, with their burden of extra work and anxiety. It can be hard to see the point in crafting another labor-intensive scholarly essay for a coterie of readers when there are so many administrative deadlines pressing and weepy students knocking, plus a late-capitalist shopping frenzy to orchestrate.
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Listening to the Noise

March 2, 2016 By: Lesley Wheeler

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In 2015, the airwaves crackled with debate about the value—or pointlessness—of academic conferences (see, for starters, “The Conference Manifesto” and “A Conference Manifesto for the Rest of Us”). Yet I love the Modernist Studies Association meeting for reliably reenergizing my research and writing. Come November, I’m generally buried under a drift of student essays, plus the holidays are looming, with their burden of extra work and anxiety. It can be hard to see the point in crafting another labor-intensive scholarly essay for a coterie of readers when there are so many administrative deadlines pressing and weepy students knocking, plus a late-capitalist shopping frenzy to orchestrate.

Yet attending a good conference forces me to work on a languishing paper and think hard about its audience and purpose. It’s even more helpful to listen to panels, roundtables, and seminar discussions, especially when you work, as I do, at a rural liberal arts college and often feel cut off from specialist conversation. Best of all, as far as I’m concerned, are the tête-à-têtes between formal events, nicely facilitated by MSA’s free sugar and caffeine. I learn why my counterparts at far-flung institutions are struggling with a new project or problem. I’m reassured that they, too, are pushing through fogs of uncertainty, juggling personal and professional crises, yet still showing up in their fancy modernism-themed outfits to present interesting and inspiring work.

The Writer's DietMy assignment for this column is “process” or, as Debra Rae Cohen originally proposed it to me, the writing life. How does interesting and inspiring work come to be? Guides to improving one’s prose already exist—Stylish Academic Writing and The Writer’s Diet by MSA stalwart Helen Sword are good examples. Still more common are advice articles on the habits of productive writers—establishing a daily practice, outsmarting writer’s block, coping with peer review. I may reference or recap such sources in this space, but it seems wise, given the riches already out there, to extend the topic of “process” in other directions. For example, one question often on my mind: what forces initiate our projects in the first place? What decisions, impulses, and pressures shape their designs, and what practices flow from those plans? There’s not enough open conversation about how various employment situations determine our effort: yes, humanists want to advance knowledge and amplify the signals of artists we admire, but job competition, prestige, and profit are motivators, too. It matters to my writing life that I am a tenured professor at a college that credits poems and literary essays, as well as peer-reviewed publications, towards promotions and raises. (I doubt I would have accepted this particular assignment otherwise.) On that note, how are current debates about the value of the humanities, and the resource shifts accompanying those arguments, affecting what and how we write and publish? How do so many modernist scholar-artists harmonize their critical and creative ambitions? Are there aspects of our particular field that inspire risk and experiment, or suppress it? Collaboration in the humanities deserves more discussion. The rhythms of an academic writing year are relevant, too, and I hope to cue up topics for April, September, and November with those transitions in mind. If other approaches would be more useful to you, or if you have an idea for a guest column in this space, please let me know. But for the moment, since I’m drafting this first post shortly after MSA 17 for a January debut, I thought it would be seasonally appropriate to start with beginnings.

In particular, provoked by the “Revolution” theme of the 2015 conference, I’m considering what projects we choose when, and why, and what futures we refuse. Certainly options are constrained by all kinds of factors including access to funding, research advice, and archives—and, again, whether you need payment for your writing or receive it indirectly through institutional rewards. When you’re facing a tenure clock, it can be necessary to persist with a project you feel tired of. A steady paycheck is a good thing. Yet sometimes, boredom or discouragement are important signals that the regime must change. Perhaps your dissertation or article has become so odious you’d rather do anything than open the dreaded file again, even organize conference reimbursement forms or submit reference letters. Maybe you’ve leapt safely through tenure’s ring of fire, and as extrinsic motivators burn away, you start wondering about what changes in your work life might make you happier. Teaching new kinds of students makes people think differently about research; so does a career shift towards administration. Or your personal life evolves, and everything you’ve learned about cancer or adoption or religious conversion or micro-brewing makes you read the old books differently.

At MSA 17, I talked to several people whose work has been revolutionized through misbehavior, distraction, and discontent. I began to register likenesses among those conversations as I listened to John Melillo present a paper entitled “Olson, Tape, Noise.” Melillo, now an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, once wrote an undergraduate honors thesis, advised by me, about music and twentieth-century poetry. Since then he’s settled more deeply into that groove, writing about “noisescapes” as well as composing, recording, and performing with Algae and Tentacles, so he’s not exactly a good example of distractibility. However, his work shows the perverse productivity of attending to what you’re supposed to ignore. “The machine records recording itself happening by leaving traces of its processes,” he was explaining as I sidled in a couple of minutes late; he then played a particularly “dirty” recording of Charles Olson reading. Melillo listens to the hiss, the distortion, the materiality of the medium and how it disrupts the illusion of Olson’s presence through voice. In so doing, he loops back into a richer understanding of projective verse. The point isn’t perversity for its own sake. Call it attention, intuition, or openness, but insight often happens when we’re listening to the wrong sound or in the wrong way.

I missed Cynthia Hogue’s presentation on H.D. and disability, “Toward a Reading of H.D.’s Late Modernist Poetics of d’Espére,” but afterwards she told me a story that resonated with Melillo’s research. Hogue had been pursuing an ecocritical approach to H.D. last spring as she struggled through a flare-up of illness. Hogue has written insightfully elsewhere, particularly in the poetry collection The Incognito Body, about pain as noise, disrupting the linguistic fluency hyperliterate professors otherwise take for granted. An intellectual’s identity is shaken to the core when he or she can’t think, speak, and write as before. Yet there is also, always, an interesting counter-question: what information can a person bring back from an episode of static?

The scholarly program Hogue had set for herself was, for myriad reasons, stuttering. Yet when she allowed herself to disobey it by focusing on disability instead of ecocriticism, the work started flowing, and she also entered remission. She noted the coincidence without spinning a grandiose tale of writerly destiny, but I vibrated to the bassline anyway: what worked was breaking the rules.

MSA17 Logo
Conference Poster, MSA17 Boston (2015); Graphic Designer: Sharon Matys.

Every acquiescence to impulse doesn’t yield a brilliant publication. Diversion layered upon diversion can result in a backlog of unfinished essays. Ideas simply fall flat, too. All writers fail sometimes, and in an ingenious variety of ways. Yet at MSA 17, even though I missed the first half of the conference because of a family emergency (talk about distraction!), I kept hearing tales of productive waywardness. In “Collecting Visions: Visual Art and the Poetry of H.D. and Marianne Moore,” Annette Debo described setting out to work on ekphrasis and becoming fascinated instead by George Plank’s illustrations. Considering how to theorize the relation of those images to writing by H.D. and Moore led her research in an unexpected direction. Suzanne Churchill presented a digital humanities collaboration, “Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde,” and when, belated and harried as usual, I found time to ask her about it, she mused about reaching different audiences and raising the stakes of her scholarship. I heard in her reply an echo of my own professional discontents. As she blogged in July, 2015:

When I presented our digital Mina Loy project at a recent academic symposium, I was surprised by the level of fear and resistance. The concerns centered on questions of ownership: What if someone steals your ideas? If published online, will your work be protected by copyright? Those are legitimate concerns that I should think about, embedded as I am in an academic economy where status and value are premised upon the quantity and quality of scholarly publications. But what I really wanted to say was: How valuable are my ideas if they don’t exist where others can interact with them? Or if they appear only in a prestigious, expensive, hardcover book owned only by university libraries and a few scholars? And are they really my ideas in the first place? Or are they ours?

I find that paragraph radicalizing. Receiving certain kinds of credit for one’s work can be vital. But it’s also important to consider that this economy, the “necessity” of pleasing specialists by writing in accordance with narrow conventions, doesn’t always serve the humanities well, nor is it always fulfilling. Complex arguments, careful research, generosity in acknowledging influence, and scrupulous peer review are wholly admirable, but so are experiment, passion, and a critical attitude about disciplinary norms.

Towards a refreshed perspective on scholarly process and productivity, here are some New Year’s provocations. Ask yourself:

  • If I could shuck off all my official responsibilities for a week and spend forty hours reading or writing anything, what would it be, and why? In other words, what project, in its own right, would motivate me to get up in the morning?
  • What’s stopping me from shifting effort to those schemes right now? Are the obstacles real?
  • What is the most important, useful work I could be doing with my talents and training? In particular, what kind of writing would benefit or interest others most? Think of publishers and employers here, but also of professional and lay audiences including colleagues, students, readers, and friends. My own writing ambitions overlap imperfectly with the labors others seem to need or want from me, but there is some intersection, and time spent in the sweet spot is intensely rewarding.
  • Could I find a few hours per week for playing around with new ideas? Consider Stephen King’s approach to the writing life: as he tells Jill Krementz in The Writer’s Desk, mornings are for the project under deadline but he often spends afternoons on “what I call my ‘toy truck,’ a story that might develop or might not, but meanwhile it’s fun to work on.” If you’re meeting your commitments, so what if that toy project falls apart? Committing to literary play saved my sanity during a stint as Department Head, and eventually some interesting work resulted. Tragically, it did, in fact, cut into my email time.
  • If even that seems impossible: can I teach towards my next obsession? If you put an unfamiliar book/ issue/ methodology on the syllabus, you’ll definitely do new work. Plus there can be a wonderful energy to joint exploration—open discussion, student-led research—rather than playing the expert regurgitator of wisdom. You can learn a lot from changing up not just the readings but the kinds of writing assignments. When you weary of grading, you may really be exhausted by an over-deployed kind of paper, just as you may tire of writing in familiar modes.

I am at least as prone to self-doubt as your average English professor but find these questions clarifying. I get more done when I keep them in mind: not just what can I write next, but what work should I be doing in service of poetry—for my students, my comrades in the profession, myself? I would love to hear other questions, answers, and tales of scholarly misbehavior from outside of my own small network via comment or back channel—but not if it detracts from special one-on-one time with your toy truck.