Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

Laynie Browne: Is there such a thing as the poet’s novel?

Bhanu Kapil: The poet’s brain changes, perhaps in mid-life.  Perhaps the poet moves from one part of the country to another.  The poet turns to the sentence as the place where questions of magnetism, gravity and light — the forces that bind a person to the earth and then release them, abruptly — might most fully be worked out.  Why?  On a scrap of paper, I draw three overlapping rough arcs.  These are sentences.  These are vectors, complicated — in this preliminary sketch —by refraction and shame: the reality of what happens — does happen — has happened — at the limit of a nation state.  Sometimes, as I’ve thought about elsewhere, a person doesn’t get to cross.  A person sees their body reflected, perhaps, in the gelation membrane that extends above and just beyond the border like an invisible dome. To exit you rupture.  What the novel-shaped space lets the poet do (perhaps) is work out what happens both before and afterwards: the approach to that multi-valent perimeter [the shredded plastic on the floor.]  To track the vector until, as I tell my students, “it disappears.”  Syntax, too, is where this [the] poet — engaging vectors in this other kind of duration —might bring a pressure to bear.  A record of forward movement but also a way of investigating the glitches and formal barriers to cultural, global or personal notion of “progression.”  Syntax has the capacity to be subversive, to be very beautiful, to register an anti-colonial position: in this respect.  I think of the semi-colon: how it faces backwards and is hooked, the very thing a content [shredded plastic] might be caught on.  A content, that is, that might never appear in the document of place.  Perhaps the poet’s novel is a form that, in this sense, might be taken up [is] by writers of color, queer writers, writers who are thinking about the body in these other ways.  With the proto-Floridian/Bay Area writer, Amber DiPietra, for example — on-going conversation about the “blips,” “errata” and “bursts” of the sentence.  See: her blog, Radio Real Time.  Amber is a poet, active in the disability poetics community — and I am not sure that she is a novelist also, but the way she takes up syntax is one of the ways I’ve been able to think about, for myself, for others: the lyric and textural scope of a novel-shaped space.  The zone of impossible life.  And how, in that zone, the poet might: stop time.  And perform.  Or install.  Something.  Last summer I taught a class at the intersection of performance art and the novel: to try and work some of this out.  For the poet’s novel I am writing at the moment — BAN — I lay down on the floor of the world and rotated [gesticulated] there, in the mud: which is nudity.  In the UK, I lay down next to the ivy on the sidewalk and set mirrors: there.  Propped in the ivy.  And studied the sky: a sensorimotor sequence.  And gathered: witness notes.  Nervous system notes.  To return to the novel: in another form.