Amassing negations of genre undoes form and mediation

Evidence

“Not writing” encircles, with its loose, looping negation—here at the line turn, here not—the sweeping negation of medium at the heart of immediacy. Enacting the unformed, unrepresentational quality of the many genres that do not shape this blocked prose poem, this is not quite a verse list, but it is a catalogue, whose point seems to be accumulation. In not writing a poemy poem, Boyer amasses negations in/and/as amassing text, an aggregation of writing that isn’t being done—accumulation by repetition. Writing negates itself, the superabundance of prose and personal gerunds undoes form and genre, but the repetitions and enjambments congeal. … Generic indistinction, a prose poem residually attached to verse devices like stanzaic structure, a non-memoir rock song, a famous poem that is not—these blurs and enmeshments and multiplied negations fructify immediacy. As forms melt and voice soars, prosaicism suffuses in many-laureled accretion of the heft of the real defying genre, undoing mediation. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 176

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines a signature immediacy move: negated-writing catalogues whose accumulation dissolves genre distinctions.