This week at Bookslut, I’ve posted a terrific interview with Laynie Browne, about her new book, The Scented Fox:
Can you talk about the relationship between the work of form & time in Daily Sonnets (which you explicitly describe as a “collaborative experiment in time”) and in The Scented Fox, which perhaps aspires to “A form which becomes what it must in the presence of the actual calamity of time”? Do these differing approaches to the time of poetry supplement one another?
Daily Sonnets is also a time experiment but of another sort. In that book I was trying to invent time which did not exist. I experimented with writing in very uncongenial circumstances, such as wrapped in a towel after a shower for a time limit of one or two minutes. I was trying to find a way to work within that sense of rapid, noisy, interrupted time very much of the moment. This was a very liberating experiment and I recommend it to everyone. Whatever constraints you think you live within, in terms of what time you have to write, try breaking them. Write standing in line, half asleep. Write in every way except the ways which are habitual. In this way time and form open tremendously. Suddenly instead of having only an hour here or there, you have all of time. I think the approaches in the two projects do supplement each other. One is more electric, the other meditative. Both are necessary. And in each book the project is a distinct experiment. All form is somehow an experiment in time.
Read the whole thing!