“the unit” is a prose poem form i invented to explore the boundaries of language, syntax, form, and musicality in poetry. It was inspired by virtuoso pianist Cecil Taylor’s groundbreaking 1966 album, Unit Structures in so far as it desires to embody the feel of collective improvisation encountered in Free Jazz as a poetics. Even as a prose form, “the unit” approaches the lyric with the precision and abandon of an instrumentalist free improvising. Each “unit” is a container, a space carved out for the celebration of ungovernment and how melodious dissonance can be. Central to the ethos of the form is Ron Silliman’s poetic device, the New Sentence. Here is a quick summary of the qualities of the New Sentence: “1)The paragraph organizes the sentences; 2)The paragraph is a unity of quantity, not logic or argument; 3)Sentence length is a unit of measure; 4)Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity; 5)Syllogistic movement is: (a)limited; (b)controlled; 6)Primary syllogistic movement is between the preceding and following sentences; 7)Secondary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole or the total work; 8)The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader’s attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below.” The unit form attempts to imitate (or model) the musical conversation the instruments enjoy in Free Jazz as it is not bound by corresponding rhythms, same time signatures, conventional melody, or harmonics. It seems (sounds) like a bunch of nonsense (noise) at first as the New Sentences (musical bars) talk at, talk over, talk around, talk indirectly about, completely ignore, and suggest other narrative or philosophical directions for the New Sentence(s) prior to it or after it. Thus, there is a marked polyvocality to poems in this form, and speaker, subject, meaning, and even tone are constantly shifting. This opens a verdant semantic terrain where every New Sentence resonates with metaphorical possibility and a complex of multiple valences. These “bars” are organized by how they sound against (with) one another as much as by how they might relate to, or enrich one another semantically. The rules for the form are simple and owe their direction and intention from the rules for Ruth Ellen Kocher‘s invented form the Gigan: sixteen New Sentences or sixteen bars. Some of the words in the first New Sentence and the sixth are combined to make up the twelfth New Sentence. The unit titles follow a number series, units numbered 90-129 were created with a JavaScript program I wrote to randomly arrange text from a database according to the rules of the unit form as an injection of a heightened sense of improvisation. They are mostly unedited and word for word what the code produced.
Where to find examples of “the unit”
Posit a journal of literature and art
We have visuals on the Vandals!!! vandals at the gate is a collaborative project between videographer and photographer Andre’ Howard, musician and composer Chris Pitts, and poet makalani bandele. In this collaboration, all the mediums operate within the modality of abstraction/non-representation—detail without context—as it might be understood in each’s respective discipline. The product of each discipline’s part could also be said to be working from free improvisational principles. Therefore, the visual language in the videos is brief, discursive, and disjunctive resulting in non-narrative shots(still & moving); each poem is in the unit form, and the music composition is Free Jazz. The videos produced in this collaborative will accompany a currently unpublished collection of units. Below is an example of one of the videos in the collaboration.