Space Please

What can space do? Clearly, a great deal. I’m trying to apply Elbow’s idea of itching and scratching etc., text as music (though Elbow does acknowledge text is not music), being pulled and pushed through text, to the teaching of Composition. For now, I’m still contemplating how I might carry over his idea to how I teach Comp. That is to say, I don’t have an articulate answer of how I might do that just yet. However, as a creative writer that has often times been terrified of writing more critical work, it occurs to me that Elbow’s idea of writing with an awareness of form--space and tension, would have been very helpful for me to have read years ago. There is something to be said for writing (and I’m thinking of critical work) that moves smoothly, and at times even lyrically, through space but is still very conscious of how that space if working. I mean, even standard MLA formatting, at times, looks quite terrible. I hate the double indent and double spacing of block quotes, which tells me that even in the most basic sense, how the writing appears on the page is aesthetically important. The last critical paper I wrote, and incidentally used in my application for PhD programs, embraced language and space as a way to move through the difficult ideas of what I was trying to convey. Had I not been concerned with space and tension, that paper would have been such a painful read, not to mention a painful write. Of course I’m not saying that it was a great paper, because it wasn’t, but what I am saying is that by finally re-thinking my approach to critical work, that not putting myself into a genre box, I was able to engage with critical work in a way that was conducive to my writerly aesthetic. So I think there is something to be said for Elbow’s idea of form as music.