Poet who left manuscript outside?
February 7, 2021 9:43 AM   Subscribe

This is a long shot but in grad school, one of my professors mentioned a poet who left their manuscript outside for a year and then made edits based on what was left? Any idea who it is and/or the name of the work?

If it helps, my grad program was in NYC so the author *could* have been from there. I don’t even know if it is even a published work. I reached out to my professor, but she didn’t respond. Any ideas?
posted by degoao to Media & Arts (5 answers total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
C.A. Conrad?
posted by intrepid_simpleton at 10:05 AM on February 7, 2021


Response by poster: It’s not CA. But good guess.
posted by degoao at 10:09 AM on February 7, 2021


Best answer: Bhanu Kapil?
posted by intrepid_simpleton at 2:49 PM on February 7, 2021


Response by poster: THAT'S IT!

The book that came from that is called Schizophrene.

The opening section, titled “Passive Notes,” tells about the author’s writing process, how she felt her original manuscript “had failed,” and how she “threw it—in the form of a notebook, a hand-written final draft—into the garden.” I related to the act of flinging art into the elements. But when I read how Kapil left the manuscript festering under winter’s snow until spring’s melt when she “began to write again, from the fragments, the phrases and lines still legible on the warped, decayed but curiously rigid pages,” and then continued to intersperse the narrative with reservations about the task she has set out to put into words, I knew that I held something extraordinary in my hands.

posted by degoao at 4:29 PM on February 7, 2021 [2 favorites]


Possibly inspired by https://www.portlandsocietyforcalligraphy.org/weathergrams/
posted by johnsu01 at 5:47 AM on February 8, 2021


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