Catherine Daly

Decoration

The vestibule should form a natural and easy transition from the plain
architecture of the street to the privacy of the interior.
  Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses

One step brought us into the family sitting-room, without any introductory
lobby or passage: they call it here "the house" preeminently.
  Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

The epigraph forms a transition via quotation
to the decorated interior of the poem
from street language.

Write lighter first lines than last lines.
End stops make lines less gloomy.

Lines background
contents or act
as decoration.

Decorate for coherence, function, and pleasure.

Construction regulates design.
Different techniques lead
to different styles.

Choose an idée fixe:
a significant antique, piece, work
which commands attention,
evocative gesture,

movement, milieu,
pattern, or period.

Apply it to unify the poem.

Gather complementary ideas
or establish your own idiom.

Pattern forces cohesion
or indicates coherence.

Pattern compels metonymy, synecdoche,
or offers consistency a twist.

Accents, motifs, and variants
continue design's rhythm.

Ideas and rhythms work alike.

Humans desire
balance, cadence, resonance in form.

The whole arrangement is established. The end of which is that there is
a suggestion that there can be a different whiteness to a wall.
  Gertrude Stein, Rooms

Shape your self to the stanza
or the stanza to your self.

Finish gaps to modulate mood.
Integrate additions.

Coordination lends a sense
of harmony's essence:  balance,
contentment, correspondence.

The rooms were too large for her to move in with ease; whatever she touched
she expected to injure, and she crept about in constant terror ...
  Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

Decorating controls space.
Voice can control the page.

Closed forms don't pleasure in reflection.
They are adorned with care, to delight;
prudently ornamented.

A professional creates and enforces
environment, space, society.

I shall think I am a great architect, if I have not got incompatible stairs and
fireplaces.
  George Eliot, Middlemarch

Education and experience qualify decorators
to select agreeable and appropriate ideas.

Less is more.

To edit, empty
your self
of what you haven't used.

Introduce ideas as you use them.

Ask, "Is this necessary?"

Consider
the stanza's purpose,
the idea's function in the stanza.

Carefully choosing invested ideas
for a stanza's scheme satisfies
born editors.

Clutter is anathema to them.
Clutter to editors is array to others.

Control the focus
to control the experience
of space.

Focus on hearth or heart for home.

Space exists
between action and reaction.

A wide action is not a width.
  Gertrude Stein, Rooms

Action, display, or vivid voice draws attention.

... a canopied bed of a rich spectacular crimson, the valance stamped with the
bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsburg, the feather coverlet an envelope of
satin on which, in massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms...
  Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

Instead of waiting or longing,
anticipate predicted results.

A preparation is given to the ones preparing.
  Gertrude Stein, Rooms

Reaction requires preparation
when a result is predictable: conversation.

A multiplicity of colors produces the same effect as a number of voices talking
at the same time.
  Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses

Tone can be voice and voice can be music.
Rhythm can be music, pattern, or style.

Voice is more affect than preference.
Voice is ambiance.

Deep voices -- intimate, precious, quiet,
secret, serious -- make close, recede
while remaining powerful.

The hotel was dark, almost black. Walls seemed to drift into more and more
corners and walls.
  Kathy Acker, Florida

To open, up, expand, enlarge,
raise eyes with long i sounds.
For lyric lift: light, night, height, flight, eye/I.

Angled lines within a grid pattern
enlarge the poem.

She isn't there and the bed looks so small he wonders how the two of them had
lain there. It has no sheets, and because the roof windows do not open the room
is stifling.
  Toni Morrison, Beloved

Music or voice can renew traditional forms.
Purity can revivify.

New use of an older theme
comments on it.

New pieces in canonical decorum
or period ideas in new contexts
seem fresh.

Walls and ceiling alike were covered with a yellow paper which had once been
very ugly, but had faded into inoffensive neutrality.
  Willa Cather, The Professor's House

Minor humor fades next to tragedy.

White mediates between warm red and cool blue.
It is cultural: blues are popular in the United States.

Blue is idealized water and sky.
Orange makes people hungry.
Yellow is associated with light.

The use of such poetic adjectives as jonquil-yellow, willow-green, shell-pink,
or ashes-of-roses, gives to these descriptions of the 'unique boudoir' or 'ideal
summer room' a charm which the reality would probably not possess.
  Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses

Art adds any imaginable adjective.

Since many plants have green leaves,
money is associated with nature in the United States,
where money is green.

There, green is wealth,
wealth, success; success, nature:
health, fertility, normalcy, a large yard.

Since nature is wealth
and virtue, money is virtue.

Chora and decors are associated with deities.
Therefore, ideas or colored objects may provide
a religious reading.

Proper planning controls
structure's virtues.

Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap
of old furniture ... so long as it serves its purpose and rounds its structure...
  Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader

Stanza size and placement,
ideas and their decoration,
affect perceived importance.

Value reacts to context.
This poem is about creating context.

Insincerity falsifies presentation.

Faux finishes or unlikely anglo- or francophilia
only seem to protect your stanza
from evaluation.

That concealing a poem's anatomy with decoration
is insincere
is a modern idea.

Temporarily replace ticky-tacky junk, bric-a-brac,
knick-knacks, tchotchkes, bibelots, etc.
with basic ideas
until you can manage more decorous ones.

A glass is of any height, it is higher, it is simpler and if it were placed there
would not be any doubt.
  Gertrude Stein, Rooms

A stanza can seem larger upon reflection.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic
and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Art reflects personality.

Conceptual decorating:
narcissus blooms float
in a shallow bowl before a mirror.

Hi-tech:
superimpose a regular grid or image map.
Focus on materials or objects.

Apply industrial production techniques.
Use craft techniques.

Read stanzas for music or voice,
but don't overlook objects.

Music is objectified.
Many voice studies study
ideas associated with objects.

Objects are smaller than ideas
and available everywhere.

Some use objects as ideas, a practice
I cannot recommend.

Have you gained objects through experience?

Art objects are ornaments
expressing conceptions.

His room was like a traveler's den, full of objects from all over the world. ...
The furs, the deep-red walls, the objects... -- everything was violently erotic.
  Anais Nin, Marcel

Physical pleasure consists in ornaments.
Figures, motifs, symbols indicate more than themselves.

Some believe words shouldn't pose
multiple meanings; phrases, ambiguity;
others, they must.

The question is this, is it possible to suggest more to replace that thing.
  Gertrude Stein, Rooms

To unpack images,
exhaust them in use,
use them every day, every way.

Ideas can have more than one function;
for example, sleeping and conversation.

Custom-made ideas are dear.
You may not able to reuse them.
They may become unsuitable or inflexible.

Functionality relieves stress.

Functional ideas offer little resistance,
and may be easier to prove.

Functional ideas serve your family first.

Every one is unconsciously tyrannized over by the wants of others.
  Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses

Do you provide function and pleasure?
Are beauty and usefulness separable?

Details perfect themes
without technology
and without maintenance ramifications
more than dusting.

A clear, consistent, edited poem is well maintained.
A maintained poem shows pride of ownership.
It is well-decorated.

Details answer questions.
Details touch.
They establish tone.

In prosperous places, details are grouped.
They range in mass, quality, or texture.

Lists represent
the same idea through time
or different perspectives on an idea.

Accessory ideas are not lists.

Details, like lists,
can erase themselves
and appear as a pattern,
filling gaps in logic and disguising shortcomings
in budget, reasoning, or research.

Art is an accessory. Art can be found.
Arranging an environment is a work of art.

Garner experience through observation.
Perceivers don't participate in mass.

Decorators seek to please. They please themselves
after creating a functional page.

Decoration instructs perception and maximizes pleasure.
It creates places pleasing to perceive.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt
that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Quick Tips:

Whimsy.

Text, texture, textuality!

Keep assumptions, reasoning, and source materials unobtrusive.

Preconceived notions offer unobtrusive storage.
Prefabricated ideas are cheap and easy.

A small change in the details of an organizing idea
can make it appear antique,
custom made,
more valuable,
or new.

Conserve the page.

Questionnaire:

List appealing ideas.
Assemble them into a commonplace book.

Group your ideas into motifs.

Try to understand reasons you accept or reject any particular style.
Do your choices come from your self
or are they familiar from your childhood?

Do you change your form? How often?
Do trends affect you?

Who will use an idea most often? How often?

Is the stanza or line in a high-traffic area,
such as the beginning or ending of a poem?
How will it handle wear and tear?

Is the idea likely to garner attention?

What activities does the idea promote?
Do you enjoy these activities?
Participate in them frequently?

What underlies ideas?
Are assumptions associated with them?

Will you expose the idea to different contexts?
Will it be opposed?

Do you prefer a lot or a little mood and tone?
Are you melodramatic? Sentimental?

Do you have curios to display?

How does your plan accommodate
education, hobbies, work?

Do you prefer formal ideas? Informal? A combination?
Note: Ad hoc ideas may be received ideas.
Formality can require attention to appreciate.

How will you organize your information?
How much of the page will you need for lists?
Which information will you want to refer to frequently?

Does your poem flow?

Is the poem private? Can it tolerate openness?
Is your idée fixe personal, secret, subconscious?
If so, you may wish to avoid performance or a confessional style.

How much of an audience do you want?
Is exchange of ideas important to you?

How crucial is control?

We conclude by substituting a jargon of words in the room of things.
  Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

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