Selections from Thirty-One Octets: Incantations and Meditations
Selections from Thirty-One Octets: Incantations and Meditations

Summary/Abstract: Thirty-One Octets arises at the intersection of several creative currents, some contemporary and some embedded in older traditions that I would like to help refresh and bring back into currency. Though I am hesitant to embrace the idea that creative work advances over time, my writing is unique in its combination and new utilization of several forms and forces: • our contemporary concern with the intermarriage of genres (these works incorporate strategies from prose poetry, flash fiction, and flash nonfiction); • the long, frequently breath-centered poetic line (as championed by Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Robinson Jeffers, etc.); • incantatory structures used in prayer, divination, and shamanic healing; • analects and epigrams (from the Confucian tradition to Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines); • meditations (Marcus Aurelius, La Rochefoucauld, etc.); • early modes of cinematic editing, particularly Eisenstein’s contrapuntal montage. At the essence of the Octets is a conception spawned by Modernism and honed through European and North American experimental aesthetic movements of the past century, in literature and elsewhere: that the fragmented modern self is better understood through the combination of multiple perspectives on that self than it is through any attempts to create narratives with unified, externally coherent perspectives. In Thirty-One Octets I actively disavow this impulse toward coherence and instead use the collision of multiple perspectives – often self-contradictory or competing – to create a montage/mosaic of a crystalline moment or state of being. Through this, I hope to elicit an echo of similar moments and states in the reader.

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