A Thing of Shreds and Patches

J’Lyn Chapman

W.G. Sebald teaches us that time is neither linear nor broken but fully present in each moment, and the past, contingent and knowable, manifests like a restless soul first in the body then on the page. Its sentence is scored by revision, dissolving contrails, the meandering footpath of the peripatetic. How can a methodology that obviates entropy and dares to sustain the paradox of failure, in which detritus serves as historical fact and destruction fortifies, also be a poethics?

“To steadfastly look toward the past, which is real and knowable, to see one’s being-in-the-world as both continuous and evolving, as even consequential and transcendent, is essential to easing the suffering of all beings. But if one opens herself to the past, the ghosts of her forefathers will inevitably haunt her.”

J’LYN CHAPMAN‘s essays and prose poems have been published in Conjunctions, Fence, Sentence, and American Letters & Commentary, among other journals. Calamari Archive published the chapbook Bear Stories and, in early 2016, they will publish the full-length collection Beastlife. Essay Press published her pedagogy of conversation chapbook, The Form Our Curiosity Takes. An essay derived from her doctoral dissertation on W. G. Sebald was recently included in the Picturing the Language of Images anthology. She is Core Candidate Assistant Professor in the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University.