Synopsis
Following the traces of the trail blazed by Francis Ponge in Le Carnet du bois de pins (1947), THE PINE-WOODS NOTEBOOK offers a simultaneous study of two environments. It documents the ecologies of two particular stands of conifers (one in the Wasatch front of the Rockies' western edge, the other in the coastal Cascades of the Pacific Northwest); at the same time, it investigates the linguistic environment at the intersection of the words pitch and pine in all of their denotations. An essay built from densely patterned sentences, THE PINE-WOODS NOTEBOOK records the surprising resonance of chance lexical encounters and argues for the inextricable interweaving of the phenomenology of the conifer (its shape, scent, and cool darkness--as well as the distinctive sound of the wind in its branches) together with the vitality of its fluid sap and disseminating reproductive processes. Both the distinctive scent and coolness of a pine grove, for example, turn out (according to recent scientific studies) to be consequences of the same chemical process, in which uniquely structured molecular chains form as the trees 'exhale.' Similarly, the emotive 'sigh' of the wind in the pine--recurrently regarded, across cultures and centuries, as the most beautiful of natural sounds--can be heard as sexual reproduction made audible, since the pine depends on the wind (rather than insects or birds) for pollination. Here, the erotic longing of pining meets the affective reflex of breath as they articulate the branching of the signifier.
About the Author
Craig Dworkin is the author of several books of poetry and chapbooks, including Dure (Cuneiform, 2004), STRAND (Roof, 2005), PARSE (Atelos, 2008), The Perverse Library (Information As Material, 2010), MOTES (Roof, 2011), Chapter XXIV (Red Butte Press, 2013), ALKALI (Counterpath Press, 2015), 12 Erroneous Displacements and a Fact (Information As Material, 2016), DEF (Information As Material, 2017), and THE PINE-WOODS NOTEBOOK (Kenning Editions, 2019. He has also published two scholarly monographs, Reading the Illegible (Northwestern UP, 2003) and No Medium (MIT, 2013), and edited five collections: Architectures of Poetry , with María Eugenia Díaz Sánchez (Rodopi, 2004); Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writing of Vito Acconci (MIT, 2006); THE CONSEQUENCE OF INNOVATION: 21ST-CENTURY POETICS (Roof, 2008); The Sound of Poetry/ The Poetry of Sound , with Marjorie Perloff (Chicago, 2009); and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing , with Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern, 2011). He teaches at the University of Utah and serves as Founding Senior Editor to Eclipse .
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