Karen Mac Cormack introduction

Karen Mac Cormack: An Introduction

New Works Studio, 18 January 2004

Our next reader is Karen Mac Cormack. This afternoon Karen will be reading from Implexures, a project which she likes to call a “trans-historical polybiographical prose work”. Its first nineteen sections have been collected in a book that was copublished last year by Chax Press in the United States and the British press West House Books; copies are available from Jay MillAr (at the back). For me it is a text which not only asks for slow, unhurried reading, but one where the role of pace, of patience, in the process of composition and in the reading experience is preeminent. I have the sense that Karen was highly aware of this too as she wrote – of how this text needed to develop slowly and of how this slowness and gathering fullness would be part of the rhythm and sound of the text. She spoke to me of her work on the project long before she felt ready to show it, let alone publish it; this was, I think, not a matter of secrecy or perfectionism, but a kind of necessary tact that the project itself had come to demand. One small turning point came, significantly, more or less at the same time that she also decided it was time to publish the first sections: by the time I received them for publication in The Gig, the working title, Sprogues, had been displaced by the new, equally strange word Implexures. “Sprogue” is unknown to the OED, though it was known to James Joyce, but “implexure” is defined there as “an infolding; a fold”. It’s now hard to imagine the work’s appearing under any other title. In its second section, there are two hand-drawn images that interrupt the text; the second of them is a timeline in the shape of an oriental fan – the kind you can snap shut or open out with a flick of the wrist. Its pleatings – its folds – are labelled left to right: “18th c. 19th c. 20th c. 21st c.”; our collective present is singled out with a label: “fin de siècle 20th c.” In Implexures personal and family history from across three centuries are by turns collapsed together and fanned out again: the “I” of the text is many different speakers, who are sometimes named but more often left unidentified. This might all sound rather Poundian in its interest in the textual layering of different kinds of documentation and different historical periods, and indeed, some of the correspondence excerpted in Implexures issues from Mediterrean settings that one might well associate with The Cantos. But this would be to miss how Implexures is an attempt to move beyond Modernist practice: it is a text which is notably curious about, preoccupied with, how we might find or construct fresh models for seeing, thinking and writing, which can find inspiration in everything from architectural practice to the curled-up dimensions postulated by contemporary string theory, yet carry off such exploratory inquiries in style, and at its own unhurried pace.

Nate Dorward