The Method

"The Method" is a manuscript of theorems and proofs written and diagrammed by the mathematician Archimedes at Constantinople in the second half of the tenth century. "The Method" is a book of poems by Sasha Steensen. The former "The Method" is a text that has survived, at least in parts, through a series of processes that includes palimpsesting - the dismantling/reassembling and subsequent overwriting of text-thievery, obscurantism, acquisition, and conservation.The latter text takes the former and its history, which has been invisible, overwritten, and requisitioned for use value, as a jumping-off place for her own meditation on the relationships that develop between a person and her historical truth, a person and her writings. Steensen's "The Method" treads carefully in the terrain of fact that foregrounds her investigations, and emerges centuries and centuries on in the only moment that remains to us. "I thought: The Method, so happily recovered. I am the one who called us all together. I driven time. I wars and waves. I was. I go over sea-lanes rife with fish. I did not. I saw a shadow on the water. I know this situation makes a perfect poem, but I will not."