Stephanie Young (-the well nourished moon-) wrote and asked some questions about -fait accompli-

Nick,

....question: about the dates on your blog entries. Are
you posting older journal entries? Have I not read you
carefully enough -- did you 'explain' this at some
point -- are you expanding on / editing the
journal/daybook entries as you post them --

all bests,
Stephanie

I thought about starting a blog for awhile and after hearing from Ron Silliman about it, and talking with Gary Sullivan I realized that once I had the title I might have an idea of what I wanted to do . This is often how I begin or end a poem, with a title. Wandering around Central Park one day early last month I realized that the blog would be called - fait accompli-. It was as if I had "read ahead" in time and glimpsed the title as if it had already existed in the future. I often have that feeling about poems or parts of poems- that I "channel" them from some 'elsewhere' where they already existed. With these thoughts came the sub-titles: spellbound speculations: time travel. I then understood that my blog would include journal entries from my own earlier journals and possibly those of others, to be used as time travel experiments. Today's entry that you commented on exemplified what I had in mind, in that the ideas, feelings and thoughts, actually written in 1992, corresponded surprisingly well with what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it today, 11 years later, in 2003. I try to change the original entry as little as possible. Even a slight change deeply effects calibrating the time travel. If the two periods of time blur into each other, without a sharp dfferentiation the time shift effect becomes fuzzier. While precision of meaning is important, the effect of a different period permeating the content adds to the "depth of field" of time past, yet still remembered, and correlating synchronisticaly with a moment in the present. This strikes me as an example of the kind of synchronicity that facilitates time travel. Of course, there is the other example of theoretical speculations in poetics about poets being influenced by poetry that has yet to be written.

The dates at the bottom of the blog entries show the date of the original journal entry. On some blog entries, entries from various periods are juxtaposed, somewhat randomly, seeking to invite or induce synchronicities. I used many of these strategies in constructing my book- Theoretical Objects- (from Green Integer, 1999). In that book I collaged journal entries, notebook writings, prose poems, essay fragments, aphorisms, poems with linebreaks, quotes and allusions to other writers and writings in order to try to induce the types of trance states that might facilitate "time travel." As in -Theoretical Objects- I layer time periods (TO is not constructed chronologically, like -fait accompli-). The late Ramez Quereshi published a review of -TO- (can be accessed through Google) in which he asks me questions and discusses my use of non-linear chronologies.

Thanks for the letter, Stephanie.

And keep those -well nourished moon- California vibes coming. We need 'em here in snow-bound Manhattan!