The Pine-Woods Notebook

Overview

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.

Reviews

"The Pine-Woods Notebook is at once esoteric and familiar, a mock-epic version of such Romantic conversation poems as Coleridge’s The Lime-Tree Bower: My Prison.In keeping with the Conceptualist model, many of Dworkin’s declarative sentences are appropriated, in translation, from other texts. But his is hardly the simulation of actual speech, much less recorded speech taken from TV and radio discourse. Indeed, the language of The Pine-Woods Notebook is resolutely literary, a set of subtly sounded phrases and sentences generated by what is primarily an etymological project. Call it Conceptual lyric."--Marjorie Perloff

Author Biography

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 .