4: Procedures
Editors' Note
I don’t even have thoughts, I say, I have methods that make language think, take over and me by the hand. Into sense or offense, syntax stretched across rules, relations of force, fluid the dip of the plumb line, the pull of eyes. What if the mother didn’t censor the child’s looking? Didn’t wipe the slate clean? Would the child know from the start that there are no white pages, that we always write over a text already there?
—Rosmarie Waldrop, A Form/Of Taking/It All
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This issue explores how things get made. It collects work that exposes the procedures, the processes, and the constraints that accompany creation. Procedural work is important because it requires a consciousness of language and form that resonates with the way we experience the world. It offers a necessary understanding of those experiences as it allows us to approach them from different angles and through new analogies. Please consider these examples invitations for writing as well as reading. Please make new pieces, new procedures, new experiences.
Source for questions: Choice and Chance: With One Thousand Exercises by William Allen Whitworth.
