Marguerite Duras

A slowing 4: Attentive decentering (1)

Part 1

Leah Souffrant

How do we create poetry with, for, of the unsayable? How can we recognize difficulty, pain – acknowledge and body it forth in art, creating beauty without stripping away the difficulty? We can consider the obvious problem of language’s limitations, even as poetry stammers ahead, through a kind of un-writing. Marguerite Duras explores this in her late work entitled Writing, even enacting the problem as she considers it:

Duras & the cinematic novel

The poet's novel

Laynie Browne

The first thing you might notice about The Malady of Death is the visual components to this book. It is slim, only sixty pages of text, like many volumes of poems. On each page the font size is larger than most large-print editions of books. I measure the opening capitol “Y” beginning “You” at one-half  of a centimeter. The page that appears the fullest contains one-hundred and sixteen words. A page appearing one of the sparest contains sixty words.  Section breaks appear as multiple paragraph breaks, a multitude of white space, and an occasional asterisk.

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