"Machine Writing" Questionnaire Part I at TCR

Here is the first installment of responses to the "machine writing" questionnaire, at The Capilano Review.

Perhaps, I have wondered too, how writing with ones hands might bring me closer to what I call “idiolect,” a term Robert Kocik uses to describe the poems in my book The Hole. Could this actually be a more accurate term than “lyric” or “expressive,” which have often been used to distinguish poetic writing that is not reliant on collage, assemblage, constraint, procedure, algorithm, or appropriation? I associate idiolect too with language that is both radically particular and eccentric, originating with rhythms and cadences and peculiarities of a singular writing practice, while also touching something that partakes of a commonplace of contemporary language use (vernacular, idiom, dialect). In this way, it may be similar to a “nation language” (Kamau Braithwaite) or a “minor literature” (Deleuze/Guattari). Kocik also distinguishes idiolect by its evocation of the “first-person-plural”; the way one may invoke collective subjects through an “I” that is neither entirely an extension of the singular or the multiple, but an expression of their simultaneous and mutual articulation.