Writing

Faculty Talks: Rachel Cohen on "The Order of Things" in writing

by Frederic Richter

Tuesday September 30, 2008

Titsworth Lecture Hall was crowded with a mix of first-years and seasoned SLC students who gathered for writing Professor Rachel Cohen’s “Faculty Talk”, part of an orientation week series. Professor Cohen, who has taught creative non-fiction at SLC for 4 years, published her book A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of America Writers and Artists, 1854-1967, on the connection between writers and artists.This gave her the knowledge to elucidate “the order of things” in writing. She addressed the issue of what is “creative non-fiction”, a seemingly amorphous and comprehensive designation granted to a dizzying array of different types of writing. Professor Cohen elaborated on the difficulty of defining the topic, but she tends to consider all types of essays, some journalism and what she terms “literary narrative” as creative non-fiction. It is in this last field that she has done much of her work, and she continued to offer an introspective reading in 7 parts, which focused on Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, mostly from 1930-1934. All three poets were immersed in the world and culture of the inter-war era, which following the Great War, “embraced” post-modernism in all its facets. Cohen’s first point, regarding the issue of order utilized a simple sentence, “Oranges, Lemons and Limes”, which contemplated the way in which the words are arranged. The audience was queried, and determined that there were 9 different ways. These included physical size, color, and juiciness but also the simple verbal aestheticism of the sentence—it sounds better. Stephens, who was simultaneously a writer and moderately successful businessman, published a book in 1936, The Idea of Order at Key West, which grappled with such issues as order, writing, creativity and “ordered creativity”. It may sound like a conundrum, especially in a field usually so widely regarded for its freedom, but the “artist frames and orders structure” yet the structure is also creative. One can use order as a tool in your writing, as Cohen pointed out, when “ordering things” one can also leave details out and insert them later, which keeps the reader tantalized. It is also evident to see how differently the placement of details can make two accounts of the same meeting so distinct. In Moore’s first person account of a meeting with Bishop, she used movement and descriptive paradox for her order; in Cohen’s she instead utilizes time and urgency as the “order and driving force” to bring out the character. Moore was so punctilious that she often wore 2 watches; Bishop on the other hand did not possess such traits Professor Cohen then read and had the audience follow, a poem by Bishop, which conveyed a “sense of Bishop’s prose.” The purpose of the audience’s reading, each line till they reached a punctuation point, was to see if it sounded different broken up—a sentence is a “unit of meaning”, each one individuated, though the last stanza suggests it is the accumulation. Moore’s order was different, showing simultaneousness, but her imagination is an act of order; her creative and artistic rigor connected with it, aesthetic integration is a reality. Cohen explained that freedom and artistic creativity does not mean thoughtlessness, “it is instead a question of the order of things”. Cohen pointed out that at college, you of course, realize 1000’s of books you haven’t read, but to care about art, all you need is time and concentration. Professor Cohen than proffered the advice Stephens bestowed on college students some time ago, to “give yourself wholly to work and order.” Simply because something is ordered does not mean it is not artistic or creative, nor does something thoughtlessly cobbled together mean it is art. There are many kinds of order, simultaneous order, experimental orders etc—but some order will likely be needed.