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Practice Has No Sequel
PRACTICE HAS NO SEQUEL is a book of prose poems, meditations on time, perception, loss and bafflement, which follows her earlier volume P R A C T I C E (SplitLevel Texts, 2015). This book is a study of perception which attempts to bring awareness to metacognition. Facets of investigation contemplative practice, liminal space, the uncanny, dislocation as well as the realm of visionary, and artistic practice. What do we practice by default when attention lapses? How to write that which is beyond language, unsayable, yet simultaneously compose? This book is an homage text for the poet Leslie Scalapino. Poetry.
116 pages, Paperback
Published May 10, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 21, 2024
There is a location or an occupation or a cordoned-off space (an “Other” space?) serving as the location for the material a self writes. Meaning what’s written is outside the self, even as it was borne of the self, or at least a writer-self. Imagine this space outside the self as a conceptual location, like your frame of mind when it’s most present with the writer-you at work, imagine the thorough understanding a self would have of its self. Like if you were at a pool of water which you had written about, you’d said it was “refreshing,” but it’s not real, it’s fictional, you’d put it in a story, and you’d placed your fictional self at the edge of this pool. It’s likely you’d wish you could be this fictive self, but no one reading this right now is a fiction. This circularity is the nature of Browne’s book. Because your self is no mere fiction, but the space your imagination creates is fiction—a fiction that feels real, and you’d appreciate if it were real. It’s the relationship “now” has with the creative impulse.
And this paradox is precisely what a literary paradox should be in Browne’s book, Practice Has No Sequel. Something generative for the writer. A series of poems casting the poet amidst her own paradox, crafting a flexible contrariety among the many poles that feel true to it. At this point in my reading life around Laynie Browne’s work, I am eager to be in the midst of any contradiction she writes to. I mean, she found the poetics of a todo list! For this book, the contradiction represented by “now” takes form as a companion to the self, and it takes the form of creative inclination inspired by the feeling and thinking self, and it takes on a shrubbery of present concerns that eagerly seek the self’s attention for a moment in her poems. It’s so hard for me to describe the variety of tensions posed by “now,” or when the writer wants to be in the “now,” but right now there are so many things occupying her attention. I find the concept of creativity outside of self complex. Like whatever analogy I try drawing for it, I feel the need to extend the analogy further, so I really get what this creative space is.
And, actually, my own impulse to extend the analogy I’m using in this review is really what Browne is talking about. Like I bring up this fictive pool of water idea, because a pool of water has idyllic qualities that are so intensely creative-sounding. Maybe I should refer to it as “a pool of water.” Where your writing might station you to pull a handful of water and look to see the reflection the story you’re in has assured you you’ll see. OMG. Even that’s not the creative now Browne writes to, but only kind of it. That’s the spirit of Laynie Browne’s Practice Has No Sequel. Something elusive, and impossible, “the space between letters” is where the creative now exists, she says on the book cover.
An artistic moment, an artistic blooming, something that should be artistically certain. It’s like what the self is to a person, the self is such a foregone conclusion. But, as Browne is explicitly clear, writing is not the self, it’s a space writing has made. A moment the writing is always reaching for. Is ambitious for. It reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Borges and I,” where Borges’s “real self” complains about the writer self taking up so much space, being so famous, and in the writer’s desperate reach to sustain his fame, he pulls from what the “real self” has experienced. And it confuses things. The one-page story is the “real self” not caring for that confusion. This kind of writer/self bifurcation is comparable to Browne’s project, at least when you think about how much of the real self would be present in writing. However, in Browne the idea isn’t that the famous writer self is stealing from the real self. It’s more about how the real self struggles to get out of the way when the writer self appears. The poems observe the nature of that struggle.
And this paradox is precisely what a literary paradox should be in Browne’s book, Practice Has No Sequel. Something generative for the writer. A series of poems casting the poet amidst her own paradox, crafting a flexible contrariety among the many poles that feel true to it. At this point in my reading life around Laynie Browne’s work, I am eager to be in the midst of any contradiction she writes to. I mean, she found the poetics of a todo list! For this book, the contradiction represented by “now” takes form as a companion to the self, and it takes the form of creative inclination inspired by the feeling and thinking self, and it takes on a shrubbery of present concerns that eagerly seek the self’s attention for a moment in her poems. It’s so hard for me to describe the variety of tensions posed by “now,” or when the writer wants to be in the “now,” but right now there are so many things occupying her attention. I find the concept of creativity outside of self complex. Like whatever analogy I try drawing for it, I feel the need to extend the analogy further, so I really get what this creative space is.
And, actually, my own impulse to extend the analogy I’m using in this review is really what Browne is talking about. Like I bring up this fictive pool of water idea, because a pool of water has idyllic qualities that are so intensely creative-sounding. Maybe I should refer to it as “a pool of water.” Where your writing might station you to pull a handful of water and look to see the reflection the story you’re in has assured you you’ll see. OMG. Even that’s not the creative now Browne writes to, but only kind of it. That’s the spirit of Laynie Browne’s Practice Has No Sequel. Something elusive, and impossible, “the space between letters” is where the creative now exists, she says on the book cover.
An artistic moment, an artistic blooming, something that should be artistically certain. It’s like what the self is to a person, the self is such a foregone conclusion. But, as Browne is explicitly clear, writing is not the self, it’s a space writing has made. A moment the writing is always reaching for. Is ambitious for. It reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Borges and I,” where Borges’s “real self” complains about the writer self taking up so much space, being so famous, and in the writer’s desperate reach to sustain his fame, he pulls from what the “real self” has experienced. And it confuses things. The one-page story is the “real self” not caring for that confusion. This kind of writer/self bifurcation is comparable to Browne’s project, at least when you think about how much of the real self would be present in writing. However, in Browne the idea isn’t that the famous writer self is stealing from the real self. It’s more about how the real self struggles to get out of the way when the writer self appears. The poems observe the nature of that struggle.
August 29, 2024
Beautiful, runs through the channels of the body into euphoria, joy, vision
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews