Foust introduction and comments on Seneca Review article and on "Binary"

Hi everyone. My name is Becky Foust and I write mostly poetry, but I have also written a few book reviews and recently began working with personal essay and short story formats. I live in the SF Bay area now but I was born and raised in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and that is the geography that haunts my poetry and prose. I am currently working on a new poetry manuscript and two short stories. I've taken a number of summer classes at FAWC over the years and have always had an outstanding experience--wonderful place.

I enjoyed the Seneca Review article and am struck by how little I know, coming into this class, about the lyric essay--I think I had thought it was a sort of shorter, more lyrical personal essay, period. I am pretty excited about all the possibilities this form actually opens up, esp. the notion of forsaking the narrative line, discursive logic and persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation. I like that the form gestures rather than dictates, insists, or unequivocally demonstrates, that it can equivocate. And that it accretes by fragments. I loved, but will need more time and work to fully understand the notion that it "elucidates through the dance of its own delivery." And I agree that similitude tells a greater truth than verisimilitude, but I'd say that this has always been so and is not so more, now (as the article suggests) in today's modern, more fragmented world. Picasso said you have to lie to tell the truth, and art has always done this, worked in metaphor.

Binary was an amazing piece--set up in sections that are numbered chronologically in a binary (instead of the usual base 10) system; that is, the sections are numbered in order according to binary code. Binary is a metaphor in the piece, both in form and in content. On a macro level, the whole piece is a binary in the sense that it begins and ends on the same image, "the most beautiful wrists in the world" (ring construction). Each section conforms to binary code, being either one (8 of the sections) or two (2 of the sections) paragraphs long. A lot of the syntax is binary, with one clause playing off another, one sentence against another, etc. In terms of meaning, the gender binary (he, she) is set up immediately in the first section and then is returned to and expanded upon in ensuing sections. (Other binaries are set up, too many to go into here, but one is support/nonsupport of the narrator's family.) The narrative is not linear or chronological, but the reader is, at the end of the piece, able to re-construct a narrative that is both of those things. The two sections I found most striking were 0111 (the "couplet" that abstracts and restates the essence of the two love stories told in the preceding sections--I met a man who taught me to hate myself (one part of the binary) and a woman who taught me to love myself (second part of the binary) and that amazing third sentence that yearns to merge or dissolve the binary--"who will teach me to love someone else?") and also section 1000. The section number--1000--is the mirror image numerical palindrome of the first section number of the piece (0001). It contains several paradoxes (a kind of antagonistic binary) that are reinforced by sound--rhyme in "it is not a switch I can flip", consonance in "It is not being greedy. Or gross" and in it both "hurts and is heaven." I thought the ending was so effective, the ring construction bringing the piece home, and that last sentence marking the first use of the gender-neutral pronoun "them"--a word that merges the binary "he" and "she." This piece has much personal resonance for me, as I have a transgender daughter and have been struggling to understand many of issues and feelings expressed here.