Tom Fallon - American Writer

Well, let’s begin at the beginning, as it is said. My carrer as an artist began in the first grade of school when I drew a yellow rabbit. I was always cutting up in the classroom except when I had a crayon in my hand so the teacher encouraged me, as did my mother, so I thought of myself as an artist from the age of six. I had talent and was considered the best artist in any school I attended. In high school, I drew sports’ cartoons for the local weekly newspaper and hoped to become a cartoonist for Walt Disney until I read Thomas Craven’s “Men of Art” from the public library. After reading the book many times, which copy I now have in my collection, I decided to become a fine artist, and received a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design. I mention my visual arts experience because it had a defining affect on my literary creation as it exposed me to fine artists in the visual sense and the experimental direction of modern artists like Cezanne, Picasso, etc.

In the second stage, I guess you could say, I began my movement toward the literary arts at the age of nineteen as I wrote notes and questions in small pocket notebooks searching for meaning in life and a way to live my life. As I had begun to question society and lifeas a teenager, I had become confused, rejecting the basic commercial values of my society, but had no other values to replace them with. I was using the pocket notebooks to find anwers to my problem with life. My first literary creations were short abstract plays written in the notebooks because I couldn’t find answers to my questions. I decided one day that I should get something out of my note scribbling so began to create short abstract plays in the pocket notebooks. I was attending Off-Off Broadway theater in NYC at the time so it was natural that I should create plays. I then progressed to longer plays, less abstract, written in larger notebooks.

Five years later, after returning to Maine, after day trips to Boston and NYC for the theater, a chance comment by a librarian, and the realization that I was not suited for urban life or the collective activity of the theater, I turned to free verse. I immediately experimented with form, specifically with the left hand margin, the physical form on the page, the visual form one can say, because I did not like the restriction it had forced on me. I felt it was too “military”. After a time, I began to create forms in the middle of the page with varied margins. I followed this by improvising in the whole space of the paper page, varying margins of course, often not thinking of margins in any sense. I called this direction “designing the whole page”. I was at the same time creating abstract word forms which I named charteng, which meant that I was rejecting poetry, (at the time I thought of it as “destroying” poetry, a direction not unheard of in the visual arts years before), for a new literary form, with a new category, just as new art categories had previously been created in the fine arts. This new category was inspired by a judgement by Marianne Moore made about her writing,“What I write, as I have said before, could only be called poetry because there is no other category...”, in an interview with Donald Hall. I moved away from the term after a few years later and began to see my work as “creations”, “pieces”, “forms”, which could be placed in no specific category, as I was creating in any form but poetry. This was at the time when some jazz artists had begun to term their compositions “music”, not jazz, because they were composing in non-traditional jazz manner. I had been very interested not only in modern visual art, but modern classical and jazz for some time.

About ten years ago, I began to create a series of 8 1/2 x 11 literary pieces to be viewed on the wall, using varied margins, improvising in the space of the whole page, framing the pieces. These could not be read aloud, performed before an audience. I then shifted the page to the horizontal, varying form on the page as well, without thought for margins of any kind, always using the space of the whole page, extending my original direction to the relationship of pieces to others in the series. I continued experimenting in this direction, enlarging the pages, sheets, “spaces”, to 11” x 17”, still for viewing as wall pieces. Finally, I used the 11” x 17” size sheet to develop what I call a “space time creation”, since I considered the page or sheet “space” of creation, for wall viewing, with the lines and line blocks arranged on the page in a visual, spatial, manner, a “tactile” manner, as in painting, for when creating I “sense” or “feel” the space of the whole page/sheet and “draw”, or create something, word lines or word blocks in the space with connecting relationships. These literary pieces for viewing on a wall are not, however, paintings: one might call it intermedia, the term Dick Higgins coined for the melding of different arts, in this case, the literary and the visual. I then enlarged the space to 13” x 19” and have further enlarged it to 3’ x 4’, single pieces, and serial, wall pieces. I am also in the process of conceiving “word spaces or rooms”, as well as”sound spaces”, which are verbal, or sound creations, in a space, which are, again, literature. These are created as literary pieces, not visual art pieces, as are some visual art creations today when employing words, but the visual serves the literary creation. So the search for new literary form, “new life”, goes on.

Those who broke new ground, mavericks and boat-rockers, one might say, entranced me, encouraging me to experiment. They encouraged me to be free, to think free, to create free. I would point to four specific influences: “Men of Art”, as I have mentioned was the first as a boy in high school. John Coltrane “The Best of John Coltrane, his greatest years”, on Impulse; Ezra Pound’s “ABC of Reading” and Off-Off Broadway theater such as Cafe LaMama and the Happening scene. These latter three I encountered at the same time during the Seventies. Generally speaking, there was Cezanne, van Gogh, Picasso, Klee, Dali and other modern artists; Thelonius Monk, Ornette Coleman, Circle, Braxton, Bartok, Ives, Varese, Reich and other moderns; T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Richard Kostelanetz, Dick Higgins. Also Eugene O’Neill, Strindberg, Hemingway, Faulkner. Foreign film directors such as Bergman, Kurosawa, etc. And, Pollock, Still, Rothko, and others. Music, art, theater, have been very strong stimulators of my thinking.

Creation is my subject matter. Creation as I experiment with form, always seeking new forms, as in the creation of new life. One might say that I am imitating the creator as he or she did and does creating the things of this world, this universe that we human beings know. I relate my experimental activity creating literary forms to the variety of created living beings that exist on the earth. I believe that I have been given permission to create new literary, or art, forms, since the variety of the creations posited by the creator here on earth exist. As far as the usual understanding of subject matter goes, or material treated by the various literary forms, the experiments, the searches, it is varied, and always has been, one might say secondary to the search for and creation of new literary forms, new life forms. I have no particular favorite subject matter although at present I am trying to deal with the “meaning of life,” the so-called “large questions”. Paul Klee, the Swiss painter, has said it best: "...penetrate to the region of that secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution. There, where the powerhouse of all time and spe - call it brain or heart of creation - activates every function; who is the artist who would not dwell there...In the wombn of nature, at the source of all creation, where the secret key to all lies guarded." And Klee's statement relates to the next point...

So at the present time I’m very mmmmuch concerned about the "age-old questions" which I have not, have never, answered to my satisfaction, even though I have embraced a religion, which have not been answered satisfactorily by others in my estimation, which are:

This originated in my crucial experience as a five year old when I learned I would die, my consciousness would disappear, as it had not appeared before my life. This was not only frightening, but reality. It was, however, something that had to be faced, understood.

(These can be related to Paul Gaugin’s painting in Tahiti, “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”) I do not remain with these directions on a daily basis, partly because they are such intense and very difficult questions. I have, however, created with the questions, not to my satisfaction, and so must return to them, since they are still questions. I think these are the most important questions we human beings can relate to in our lives. When you consider the above questions, sex, human and social relations, politics, pale, except when placed within those questions. I know from my recent reading that Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking have spoken of these questions within the overall problem of “god” and creation as related to their work in science My reading of Einstein, who took a position on some questions that Hawking has not, has supplied important directions for me but did not resolve the problem, which is, of course, “the problem of god”. However, I do not believe that any subject can be exhausted if the mind of a person is deep and broad enough, and there is not enough time in a human life to deal fully with any subject. Last, I am drawn to the above questions because it is “necessary” to have the answers.