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.

Tropical Harlem

February 23, 2021 By: Akua Banful

Volume 5 Cycle 4

Tags:

writing anthropocene

Photograph of 9204 Bridge Lane, lightning.
Fig. 1. Photograph of 9204 Bridge Lane, lightning. July 18, 2006. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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.

Watching the summer's violent thunderstorms through my apartment windows, I found myself shocked by how forceful, how tropical, how reminiscent of my childhood in Ghana these downpours were. Although I had been trying to write about how the notion of temperate climates was as ideological as it was meteorological, I wondered how a climate this fickle, whose fluctuations had been heightened by the blurring together of time in the pandemic, could really be considered anything resembling moderate.

The ferocity of the lightning that accompanied the storms was beautiful, sublime even. Yet, watching for weeks as rain came sleeting down, as the sky appeared to be seized by some deep existential shrug, I couldn't help but wonder whether this tempestuousness was only literal, rather than a metaphor for the seasons that lay ahead. In July and August, with infection rates down, and nary a tourist in sight, my Harlem neighborhood took on what I can only describe as a sort of harrowed glee. Amidst the pictures of neighborhood fixtures who had succumbed to the virus, the curbside candles with the occasional glass of libation, the neighborhood came alive again: the fire hydrants gushed water onto the streets almost incessantly, quenching nobody but the occasional round of playing children and the parched asphalt. The roses entered their muddied summer bloom, what looked to be a regular house plant sprouted a lonely bud that blossomed into the fragrant white flag of a peace lily, a symbol of the times.

My dissertation, which examines the connections between empire and discourses of climate in the tropics, uses readings of novels by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Alejo Carpentier, Pepetela, and Emmanuel Dongala to argue that empire and climate are slippery and mutually constitutive terms, and work through the puzzles that remain for our understandings and representations of the tropics in the aftermath of empire. In what had felt like a fit of inspiration, I gave it the working title of “The Hostile Tropics.” Stuck as I was by what seemed to be a never-ending loop of revisions on my second chapter, it had started to feel as though that my dissertation was directing my way some of the hostility I had (cheekily) tasked it with interrogating. As I strained to imagine the American tropics from my writing desk, it was difficult to miss the fecundity of life around me, made all the more beautiful by the grief surrounding it; the proximity of life and death, of decay and fecundity, was especially pronounced to me as I tried to chisel out a sense of peace, and sculpt a dissertation chapter.

To wrap one's mind around the American tropics this past summer was also to embrace the tempests, the freak weather and rampant destruction of the hurricanes that circled over the Atlantic as a political one came ashore. When a white teenager took a gun to Kenosha and killed two racial justice protestors in what was already a season of upheaval, I wondered if the whole country was suffering from the acquittal of reason that Montesquieu pinned on hot climates. My metaphors jumbled and then escaped me: was this a hurricane or a season of unbearable heat?

***

Presently, it has been so unseasonably warm that my only tether to the fact that it’s November has been the presidential election. After a week of startlingly frigid rains, the weather in Manhattan is veritably tropical. For what must be the fourth or fifth time, I return to my chapter on the American tropics with a determination indexed by my yellow legal pad and a trial version of Scrivener. To assure myself that distribution is imminent, I have taken to itemizing: the arguments each section makes; the number of revision tasks awaiting me in the document as a whole; the number of days remaining until my self-appointed deadline. Enumerating what’s going on in an unruly document has given me a new sense of the possible. The feasibility of my deadline is questionable, but it provides sorely needed momentum in a pandemic reality that has long since lapsed into mind-numbing monotony.

It has always struck me as ironic that I, a person with what is at best an antagonistic relationship to hot weather, spend the bulk of my professional time reading, thinking, and writing about hot places. The process of scholarship imitating life alternates between being funny or plainly jarring. Over the summer, as I read old medical tracts attributing the sluggishness, and sometime irrationality, of Europeans in the tropics in the summer heat, I find myself overcome with similar exhaustion and irritation. Which parts of that could I blame on discourse; which parts could I blame on the actual ninety-degree weather? For years I have taken to jokingly describing myself, and my general aversion to hot weather, as post-tropical—a predicament hastened along by the fact that I was born and raised where the equator and the Greenwich meridian collide. This post-tropical condition has always found me escaping New York in the summer, spurred by a mixture of a graduate student’s finances and a hankering after somewhere cooler to ride out the heat. And yet, as the first summer I had spent rooted in my Harlem home came to an end, I found myself wistful, longing for 9 p.m. sunsets as the days grew shorter. Perhaps, tropical Harlem has finally put an end to my post-tropical condition—for which, I’m sure, my dissertation will thank it.