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| Jennifer K Dick, from Lilith, a novel in fragments |
1) fragment as ABSENCE: as something which remains when something has been taken away (into which one might put the practice of erasures, but also that of work retrieved but only in part),
2) fragment as bits of SOMETHING BROKEN-- language spaced over a or many pages opening up the white of the page to various ends, fracutred narratives and identities, ruptured languages
3) fragment as ELLIPSIS--making a place for the unsayable, the white page to act as a unit of (unspoken) speech, including in this case a densification of the pause or caesura.
What is YOUR fragment?
Can you take a moment to reflect on this question and also to suggest books which, for you, fall into the category of books you like and/or wrote which for you use "the fragment". Where did your use of fragments emerge from (a particular tradition, reading someone or many people, or realization about space on the page, for example?) AND what do you think the fragment contributes to your work in particular? Feel free to list books you have written which you consider good examples of poetic fragment in use.
LISA PASOLD RESPONDS
and—in line with reflections on the fragment in her work, Bryan Evans, in Fast Forward Magazine, stated that in A Bad Year For Journalists, "She weaves disjointed memories, from rusty jeeps to lust to typewriters." Her debut novel, RATS OF LAS VEGAS, was described as "enticing as the lit-up Las Vegas strip and as satisfying as a winning hand at poker" by The Winnipeg Free Press. See more at: http://www.lisapasold.com/)
This is what she had to say:
THE FRAGMENT
My use of fragments emerged definitely from reading others’
work.
Fragments continue to be useful in generating my own work because of the obvious practical issue of
building long poems (which I prefer writing) from my daily writing (which is
short gatherings from conversation, signage, reading, thoughts throughout the
day).
Relating to your definitions 1 and 2 (fragment absence and fragment as bits of something broken or as ruptured language), my 2006
poetry collection A Bad Year for Journalists most directly uses these kinds of fragments.
I wrote these poems as a mash-up of the language from my various journalism
gigs: my job in the music industry (writing for Billboard) and other kinds of
reporting work, including some experiences while I was in Kenya. Fragments of
various friends’ and war correspondents’ life stories, lyrics from songs, and
news headlines found their way into the manuscript. I worked on these poems as
a quilt, piecing together used and/or left-over lines of language, binding them
together to create a new pattern which pleased me. Like a quilt made of
personal scraps, I look at the poem and see references to the original source
material, but I think the result for other readers is more abstract. This
abstraction then makes the work feel as if there is an absence—and that absence
made sense to me when writing about the emptiness of journalism. I was trying
to discuss how the music industry and the war reporting industry both produce a
whole lot of verbiage, yet leave huge unspoken yet officially-sanctioned gaps
in which facts are chosen to be discussed. Those absences often appear in the
journalists’ lives as an acute experienced rupture from normal life. I was
trying to write about the emptiness that journalism can produce.
Now that I think about it, though, I realize that I’m
currently trying to stay away from the kind of fragment you define as an ellipsis, maybe because I
used it too cheaply early on in my work and when I do find myself slipping into
that kind of pause, I am suspicious of my motivations. And yet, all my poetry does come out of an assemblage of fragments.
