Song of a Living Room

Brigitte Byrd

An author's statement

As soon as it was released in 2000, I read Lyn Hejinian’s The Language of Inquiry, a book that helped me define my own poetics and understand my own aesthetics. Like Hejinian, I believe that “Poetic language is . . . a language of improvisation and intention. The intention provides the field for inquiry and improvisation is the means of inquiry.” Thus in writing Song of a Living Room, my field of inquiry was a couple who step into a relationship as one steps into a magic circle (more accurately in their case, they step into a Celtic knot) which opens an imaginary world to them, a world they create, a world that also creates them, a world that forces them to create each other, a world that blurs time and space, a world in which they escape reality, a world in which they may lose themselves.

Because prose poetry is a form that is natural to me, a form I love, I wrote Song of a Living Room as a series of prose poems revolving around these two characters. There is a bit of ambiguity at times since there is a third character whose absence is felt throughout. This third character is anchored in reality and must be left outside the main characters’ imaginary world, like most consciousness of reality, if their relationship is to survive, which indeed it does not. The poems build upon each other as the book progresses, until the end circles back to the beginning following a shift, which signals the two characters’ return to reality.

Since form and content are interrelated, I composed a strangely “circular” narrative where the ending seemingly finishes where the beginning started (as in a Celtic knot), and yet the two characters have changed (or maybe they could not keep reality at bay any longer without falling into madness). This movement is signaled by my reusing, in the last part of the last section of the book, most of the words found in the first section, which I like to think of as a sort of structural deconstruction since the “meaning” has changed. By their very bareness, the very last pages of the book show a sort of final dismantlement of the dream-world which the two characters had entered at the very beginning.

To go back to Hejinian, “Poetry . . . takes as its premise that language is a medium for experiencing experience.” This is a very important concept to me because I firmly believe that all writers write more or less from their experience, and maybe for me it is more than for others. . . . Anyway, while writing Song of a Living Room, I drew from my daily life, my experience, and transferred this experience into the characters’ experience, which amazingly informed my experiencing of experience. As a result, throughout the collection, the poems flirt with fiction, and simultaneously, they are my reflection on the elements of fiction. Inevitably, the poems drift into the surreal, which means that I do not resist my imagination but run with it. The poems play with language, which indeed I love to do, and eventually, the structure of the book deconstructs itself (at least that was the attempt).