Two things from the last post that I want to follow up on in the next week or so: chance and the shrinking poetry-buying dollar. In the spirit of what follows, I flipped a coin to determine the order. So, here are some thoughts on not making shit up.
Maybe it’s all the Flarf and Conceptual stuff I’m reading (and reading about) these days, maybe it’s that I’ve been playing some composition-by-chance games with my students and on my own, but I find myself nostalgic for the good old aleatory poem. Whether a Cagean writing-through, an Oulipian cut-up, a MacLowesque diastic, or even a cool, refreshing Surrealist automatic writing exercise, it’s fun to take a chance on chance both as reader and as writer (if that last noun’s really the right one; I tend to say that poems I’ve produced through these games are ones I’ve made rather than written).
As reader: I’ve been enjoying re-reading Jackson MacLow lately. I picked up (by chance?) a couple of his books a year or two ago at a great used bookstore in my part of the world and they sat on my bookcase until, needing to choose some Susan Howe and Haryette Mullen poems to teach this fall, I saw them and flipped through. Wot larks! Gentle Reader, hie theee hence and read a little MacLow (there are a few poems here, for instance). To tempt you thither, “Call Me Ishmael”:
Circulation. And long long
Mind every
Interest Some how mind and every long
Coffin about little little
Money especially
I shore, having money about especially little
Cato a little little
Me extreme
I sail have me an extreme little
Cherish and left, left,
Myself extremest
It see hypos myself and extremest left,
City a land. Land.
Mouth; east,
Is spleen, hand mouth; an east, land.
But don’t stop there. Even with no French, you can find examples from Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poemes, a do-it-yourself assembly kit from which may be assembled 10-to-the-14th different sonnets. Bev Rowe has a good translation project going on these. Here’s one:
At five o’clock he rests in his marquise
and sleeves are wrapped round horns of buffalo
the chosen fruit is hued a bright cerise
who knows if sharks will feast on bummalo
The Papuan sucks his friend’s apophyses
your mind turns more and more to gloom and woe
going up to visit town is quite a wheeze
most people like to read the words they know
Milord has lisped from Malibar to Swat
you mix with that you’ll find you’ve had your lot
shame gives a colonel’s brow a greasy sheen
Those Latin states spin like a weathercock
one carts off debris marble from the block
but best is grilled black pudding with sardine
As a writer: I suggested some aleatory methods to my first-year poetry students as a way to help them get out of the prison-house of self-expression and to play the language game of poetry as a poetry of gaming with language. The results were mixed (they always are, I think, with these methods, though in that regard the poems produced are not all different from those produced by other means; there are a lot of bad poems in which every word was consciously and intentionally chosen, too). And, though I don’t write poems much, having long ago realized that I’m better at reading the stuff than at writing it, I gave some of the games a try myself.
That’s when things got weird.
The Pill, Gentle Reader, does not believe in magic, but at a certain point it began to feel as though the interplay of rule and found text was generating stuff that spoke to where I was and what I was thinking and feeling. To wit: I tried some varieties of writing through – using the letters of a name or phrase to select from an existing text a bunch of fragments that became lines. Sometimes I looked for words beginning with the letters of the phrase, sometimes words in which those letters simply appeared. I used the letters’ numeric values to choose page numbers on which to search, lines on the page at which to begin searching, and, sometimes, the number of words to include that fell on either side of the one in which the letter appeared. A couple of results from this kind of game played with Thoreau’s Cape Cod can be found in an essay of mine. But the real magic came when, over a Thanksgiving weekend during which I felt particularly low, I worked through Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy with the letters of a significant proper noun. I won’t hazard a comment on the quality of the product, but I will say that, for the first time, I felt what some writers who use such methods have talked about – something was guiding me to bits of language whose relevance to my situation was palpable. I’d read Burton with great pleasure before, but this time it was like the book was talking to me about me.
Here’s number 3, of 12:
They beget one another and tread in a ring.
If it takes root once, it ends in despair,
perturbation, misery. Torment
hinders concoction,
causes men to be red.
Conceive what it lists,
broken with reproach,
forsaking country and dear friends.
Mischances misaffect the body:
almost natural,
being barren,
some quarrel or grudge, some contention.
I know, I know. There’s an explanatory circularity here: feeling melancholy, one applies the source of the feeling to a text about the feeling and, voila, poems addressing the feeling emerge. But it felt like something more, and for that reason alone I’d recommend giving such games a shot.
Dear Mr. Pill,
ReplyDeleteA poetic career indeed tried the new poetry of political events. The extraliterary world already spent much energy for political causes. A European defense intensely wrote the journalistic articles about letters, and in his larger loyalties, these literary poems increasingly saw beloved Italy. Verbal arms also educated the Experimental College after more poems later worked as a Daily Worker, and when the Spanish army posthumously remarked the political commitments, the public humiliation was culturally literary. A gifted poet effectively inters the many poets. Since separate politics even travel to Spain, the Spanish Civil War rigidly wrote the political knowledge, and when writers’ position statements clearly opposed sustained writing, the Civil War even had become the compromised politics. When a fighting speech felt just dirt at a political meeting, original mind now survived the rich women, and where busy griefs forcefully involve his poetry, the preceding decade constantly survives. A removed action even holds a vital role, and mediated ways often fashion subjective responses. In these efforts, while poetic pronouncements thus never judge a fond poetry, and when doomed failure dominated American institutions, a politicized criticism just judged impossible poetry for their work. This national politics especially wrought deep changes when the New Criticism easily dismissed political poetry on the characteristic fault.
doomed,
ReplyDeletesounds better your way than in the original!