Great! It happened! Just when I thought I was beginning to lose hope of feeling excited again. Ron Silliman’s post a week or so ago alerted me to Carol Watts’ alphabetise -(http://www.lulu.com/content/894954.)

Why do I like it so much? Here are ten reasons:

One. The slim volume format (did she make and bind it herself?). Writing in longhand (recto) paralleled by a typed up a ‘clean’ version (verso) with what looks to be SOED headword and definitions. A feeling of immediacy, a work in progress, something ‘raw’ and exciting.

Two. The structure. The alphabet – one word per letter as an anchor or starting point for the texts. Clever idea! Did she pluck the words at random and then write? The relationship between headword and text is not always clear (none the worse for this).
I’m reminded of Christine Stewart’s Taxonomy (using encyclopedic/Linnaean species structure). Scientific rigour and seemingly anti-imaginative categorization allows fantasy to take flight.

Three. The diaristic method giving a freshness and improvisatory quality. Encounters, anecdotes ... I’m thinking of O’Hara’s ‘I do this’ style & other New Yorkers. Even Laurie Anderson’s dead pan lyrics – the quirky, the slant, the life into art effect*.
However, it’s far from ‘offhand’. The choice of entry, the movement from sentence to sentence, the brevity and arrangement of the apparently banal are artful. (Here I’m reminded of Lyn Hejinian, Ron S himself – although, for me, Watts feels closer to home).

Four. What she lets in: restaurants, geographical place names, current events, sense impressions, commuting, her reading ... . This I find especially helpful and what has preoccupied me reading Keith Waldrop’s early poems. Finding a form for a poem to accommodate just about anything. And, inevitably, what she (and he) notices, includes, bothers about, delineates a ‘self’ a personality – but as a byproduct of writing.

Five. What a last line can do. Here, dislocating the preceding event or topic into a new context. Or what her phrasing does – a choice of word – a deliberate awkwardness (even malapropism). Not all of them work – and perhaps that’s number ...

Six. Just enough roughness, places where the seams show to make it approachable and not too forbidding?

Seven. The inclusion of deletions and corrections even in the typed up copy. Thus the printed text remains provisional, in movement, awaiting a further reading. (And who’s to say print is necessarily superior to the handwritten?).
And that has to be one of Watts’ concerns here: language’s dubious and duplicitous relation to fixity. How words seem to pin down time, experience, the Self ... and it is embodied within the very form of her book: its written-but-typed status. Not at all a precious Artist’s Book For The Sake of Artist’s Book.

Eight. The sense of a writing exercise – was it, in fact, inspired by one of Bernadette Meyer’s Writing Experiments? I wonder. The idea of persisting with a particular rule or set of constraints. She dates the book and entries quite clearly (although who’s to say these dates hold true – no coincidence, surely, that one of Watts’ official academic publications seems to be on Sterne’s unreliable autobiographer Tristram Shandy).

Nine. Related to which, for all her evident reading in Theory & Poetics (there's the day job and notice the just discernible quote from Badiou in the back cover), she wears her learning lightly. (Contrast, say, Barrett Watten in Frame).

Ten. A feeling of looseness, limber writing. I’m not sure she’s so hung up on sound here (although there are logics and patternings suggesting the ear is thinking). She seems to prefer the poetry to declare itself in the shifts of idea and syntax. (Maybe that should be the shifts of idea in syntax? And that, of course, brings in Stein). Might too self-conscious an acoustic structure spoil the text – too crafted, lyrical, shapely?

Anyway, I love it. And best of all it’s sent me back to the notebooks.

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* I remember seeing Anderson’s own little notebooks (covered in brown paper) at the ICA back in the 80s. Similar to Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, they contained Conceptual texts and instructions. Has she ever published these?