Work from Memory: In Response to In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

by Dan Beachy-Quick, Matthew Goulish

Overview

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Dan Beachy-Quick and Matthew Goulish set up a room in Marcel Proust's house of memory in which poetry and prose could enact a dialogue, structured as a parallel weave, on several subjects from Proust's novel, as a way of extending their experience of reading. They selected three aspects or elements from Proust's work and wrote in response to them, on alternating pages that also responded to what the other had written. These were the first book, Swann's Way; the in/famous "long sentence" in Sodom and Gomorrah; and the idea/concept of captivity as marked in the moment in The Captive when the narrator watches Albertine as she sleeps. The result, on face-to-face pages, asks the reader to figure out what to privilege in the reading, a work that requires both memory and audacity (how return, how move forward, to read everything, or to privilege one form over another).

"I will recall passages from this book like the stanzas of songs I heard on the radio during my childhood, word for word at the most unexpected times. Or, I will forget the words of this book entirely only to experience what the book describes—all of my faculties working together simultaneously unaware that they are each part of a cosmos. Let us navigate this multi-verse by appending the names of favorite authors to newly discovered constellations. Let us imagine that each book we've read is the same book, one read to us long ago by a beloved caretaker who satisfied our every need before we could recite the alphabet. This book."—Gregg Bordowitz

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781934103302
Publisher:	Ahsahta Press
Publication date:	09/15/2012
Series:	New
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of five books of poetry, most recently CIRCLE'S APPRENTICE (Tupelo Press, 2011), as well as a number of chapbooks, including APOLOGY FOR THE BOOK OF CREATURES (Ahsahta Press, 2009). He has also collaborated with the poet Srikanth Reddy on CONVERSITIES (1913 Press, 2012). Works of prose—essays, meditation, and tales—include A Whaler's Dictionary (Milkweed Editions, 2008) and Wonderful Investigations (Milkweed Editions, 2011). His work has been supported by the Lannan Foundation. He teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Colorado State University.

Matthew Goulish co-founded the performance groups Goat Island in 1987, and Every house has a door in 2008. His 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance was published by Routledge in 2000, and Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island, which he co-edited with Stephen Bottoms, in 2007. THE BRIGHTEST THING IN THE WORLD: 3 LECTURES FROM THE INSTITUTE OF FAILURE was published in an edition of 500 by Green Lantern Press, 2012. He was awarded a Lannan Foundation Writers Residency in 2004, and in 2007 he received an honorary Ph.D. from Dartington College of Arts, University of Plymouth. Goulish teaches in the MFA and BFA Writing Programs of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.