Testing. Testing.

[An evolving post, moving up front again.]

Process is ir/relevant in the following sense*:

If a poetry were a garment, the poem would be what is known as the right side.
The process would be the construction details hidden on the seam side.

The right side requires a seam side. Sometimes a garment's construction is part of its right side. For instance, raw-edge detailing, frayed or distressed effects, an "authentic" patch, or decoratively serged or otherwise exposed (displayed) seams.

The right side and the seam side can be the same side, in this sense. But in that case the right/seam side is constructed by virtue of an additional undisplayed seam side.

From the point of view of the sewist seamstress [sorry for the built-in lady, but tailor won't do], the seam side is not irrelevant. The seam side is the right side. The right side and the seam side are mutually dependent & equally essential.

From the point of view of wearer--the garment's user--is the seam side, those details that are not displayed right-side, relevant? (*Maybe relevancy is the wrong attribute, unless we talk about users & makers.)

Does the wearer ever need to acknowledge/examine details without a decorative right-side function? The garment still hangs together & fits if she does not. Might she be interested to know how the garment works? Will that make it a better garment?

And I misspoke before about process = construction details. Or rather I contradicted myself right away. Process does not equal construction details. Construction details, as we have seen, can be displayed right-side, concealed seam-side, or both. All activities that go into the garment's construction are process. Process is obviously relevant in an existential sense.

Many times you will meet something in denim that has been "broken-in for authenticity." Sometimes right-side construction details perform the same kind of function.

The first example I come up with as a work that might show most of its construction details on its right side would be Under Albany. Just one iteration.

Google-assisted Flarf might be one example of some construction details being displayed on the right side. A poem in a traditional form (like sestina or metered sonnet) might also be displaying construction details; but we'd need to talk more about functional vs. decorative seaming, and to what degree the formal elements are either or both.

That's too large a swatch--to say "Google-assisted flarf"--but I mean some of the poems that are up-front about containing sampled language, such as those in Deer Head Nation. Others may sound sampled, but not really be sampled--and those might be "broken-in for authenticity." It may be impossible to know in some cases if a poem is (partially or wholly) sampled or not, authentic or "authentic." (I'm concerned about this word authentic because I don't mean the opposite would be fake & I don't mean it as a value judgment. A frayed hem is a frayed hem; what we're concerned with is whether it frayed through wear over time, or if it was assisted by some applied technique.)

Jenny Boully's The Body might be another example of "authentic" detailing I meant earlier, in that its footnotes refer to an absent right side, which probably never existed. But I'm not really sure yet, and it's been a couple of yrs since I read the book. I'll have to think more about that.

Kasey remarks on "the seamy side of life" and I also recognize that "seamless" is an approbation, but let's try not to read seams with those connotations in mind for now [inserted:] reading seams with those connotations in mind may also be interesting.

What is process without tools or object? That has been one person's (Lbehrendt at the Limetree comment thread) quibble with this metaphor. I don't think I understand pure process in that way. (The action of making is where I derive the greatest pleasure in my own writing--but I also derive pleasure from the end result, & also from the pleasure others take in the end result: the made object. Yes, I am privileging pleasure. You don't have to.)

I am still playing around with the sewist metaphor and might not like it myself when I am through. We'll see. I happened to be sewing when this occurred to me a few days ago. Here's a set of statements characteristic of this blog at mynamedotcom: I am becoming more aware of the constructedness of my poems, & I'm moving toward a greater emphasis on constructedness in my poems, & I am drawn less than I was in the past to smoothing them or making them appear seamless. I am not only interested in their construction; I am simultaneously interested in displaying their constructedness. More generally speaking, I like displays of constructedness--what I am calling seaminess--in others' poems because as Thomas Basbøll said at Limetree, thinking about how a poem works is part of reading it. Or it is for me.

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I'm wanting to back off the examples I've given now, a little (thus, the tiny type). I need to think more about this before I try to apply it.

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Patrick Durgin (at Kasey's comment thread) asks about the class structure of this model:

The seamy underbelly of stable, lyric subjectivity is structurally too similar to sweatshop-style exploitation to ignore, don't you think? I mean, what are we hiding--and why are we hiding it, for whom, in whose interest--when we deem the gleaming surface the "right side"?

I am thinking of a wholly different kind of sewist, certainly not sweatshop labor. (I do work in the fashion industry tangentially, as a copywriter). I am thinking of the kind my grandmother was; she "took in" sewing for individuals, as well as making most of the clothing for her family. She also worked in a shoe & boot repair shop mending & stitching tooled leather goods. The sweatshop model (or even if we supposed an ethically responsible factory model) is too large for my purposes. Poems are not mass produced. There's no roomful (or razor-wired fenced enclosureful) of sewists turning out multiple copies of the same thing. The economy of the sweatshop model is a wholly different one. But I'm glad Patrick brought this up, so I could clarify that. (Maybe tailor would have been a better word than seamstress/sewist to begin with, as a way of brushing aside the exploited-labor connotation.)

I don't consider the seam side "the underbelly" or read "right" in "right side" quite the way Patrick has been, as superior to the seam side. As I (eventually) worded it above, the sides are mutually dependent and equally essential. "Right side" is a sewing term that simply means the side that is presented, worn on the outside of the finished garment. The messier construction details are generally concealed in a garment, & I've spooled my way around to talking about the decision to reveal (or not conceal in the first place) some of those details.

"Right side" can also refer to the printed side of a fabric, as opposed to the unprinted reverse (which is usually called the "wrong side," but I don't want to introduce "wrong" as the reverse of "right" here). The right sight of a garment and the right side of a fabric do not have to coincide. I made a dress in high school once using the reverse of a printed fabric because I liked the way the weave was accented over the pattern. (I actually wore this dress in my senior picture. Maybe I'll post it, if it's not too embarrassing.) I made the wrong side the right side simply by choosing to display it.

To approach Patrick's question from another angle: is concealing a poem's seams an ruling-class/elitist behavior? I don't know. I guess it could be a gesture of condescension in cases. If conventional [revised from "mainstream"] lyrics tend to conceal their process seams in favor of a smooth, neat right side, maybe so. But I am imagining readers who prefer poems with right sides like this appreciate the neatening. It seems that some readers argue that a neat right side is best, and some that a messy or process-revealing right side is best.** (We're back at taste (fashion sense), but the metaphor's still holding up OK for me.)

Alternatively, some poems could be so simply constructed--a straightforward lyric meditation that moves as one developed thought, or a brief epiphanic narrative with a single metaphor, for example--that there's not many messy seams to conceal/minimize/decorate in the first place.

If seamy poems have a less seamy/smoother seam side by virtue of some of their seams being displayed on the right side, does this mean smoother poems have seamier seam sides. Uh, not necessarily. Metaphor breaks down there. Ah well.

&, if some smooth poems do have intricately seamed seam sides, does this mean that seamy poems have smooth poems as their reverse? This is a little too binary a construction for me, that every poem has two possible right sides, a seamy and a smooth.

[**More, probably, later.]