Exhausted Yet? Cut up Machines, Code Poetry and More

First, Nada Gordon explains the world to us. 

(2019 note: Actually, this is just her reading a funny poem about art at the Whitney over ten years ago. I was there. It was sort of a Ken Goldsmith celebration.)

Here Nada Gordon wanders her kitchen and explains the realm of lyric-loathing -- lyric as "whipping girl" -- that brought us flarf. She discusses being educated by the critique of the lyrical subject, and the resulting decision to create lyrical voices out of shards, borrowed language and collage; she claims that flarf really carries the torch for poetry. She says, basically, We are dedicated to saving poetry and keeping it alive. The whipping girl, the lyrical subject, is now revived by flarfists as a zombie. (Which is pretty well what the first link is doing.) 

See what I mean? Trying to find something new can drive a poet crazy. Which is generally where a poet likes to be. And has been for a century, but we'll just start with the Fifties. 

From the 2017 Getty show on Concrete Poetry of the 50s, 60s and 70s. 

1975 performance of "Peter Innisfree Moore" by Jackson Mac Low, a poem/song/dance created by finding 960 words in the Fluxus photographer's (Moore's) name and using chance operations to express (also musical notes, dance moves, etc.)

Nice roundup of experimental poetry from textext.com.

A link to the Language Is a Virus cut-up machine. 

Check "Recombinant Code Poetry" at the bottom of the options on this archived page from Beehive.

Fantastic link re: L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E P-O-E-T-R-Y.

And, a propos of something related, syllabus from hypertexter Stephanie Strickland. 

To think about Strickland and the proliferation of options, it's nice to remember Raymond Queneau, who created a flip book of sonnets in which the lines were cut so that the reader might create 190 million poems. Then he went and titled it Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes, or One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Randomization designed to destroy narrative and kill author/birth reader. Yes.

Queneau's pals formed Oulipo, hoping to create artificial constraints that would remind us of the real ones we live with all the time. My favorite take-away has been the N+7, a process that replaces every noun with the seventh noun following it in the dictionary. Here is Spoonbill's N+7 machine.  Here are a few examples.  

17 GOOGLE poems linked on Huff Post.

Czech poet and mathematician Ladislav Nebeský (b. 1937) (whose father was murdered by the Nazis in 1940) began as a concrete poet and ended as a binary poet.  Here are "8 Planar Binary poems." And here are his "Non-Written Words."

Flarf starring Sharon Mesmer. 

And my favorite Vito Acconci.

Don't forget Alan Sondheim. 



"All art should become science, 
and all science art." 
(Friedrich Schlegel)

Writing about Thinking

One of the first things I heard in grad school was from Rosellen Brown, who tried valiantly to warn me away from the "sitting and thinking" story.

I didn't take the warning completely to heart, though I knew it was serious and applied to me. Hence, no doubt, my own fiction output.

Now I find that I have the same basic discussion all the time with my college students. Through one of them this semester, I came across this exercise from the beloved Chuck Palahniuk. In the essay, Nuts and Bolts: Thought Verbs, Palahniuk offers up an incredible discipline in examining these problematic thoughts--these insights so crucial to us as writers and so deadly boring to our readers. The essentials are below:

...pick through your writing and circle every “thought” verb.  Then, find some way to eliminate it.  Kill it by Un-packing it.

Then, pick through some published fiction and do the same thing.  Be ruthless.

“Marty imagined fish, jumping in the moonlight…”

“Nancy recalled the way the wine tasted…”

“Larry knew he was a dead man…”

Find them.  After that, find a way to re-write them.  Make them stronger.

 Check the whole thing out here and give his exercise a shot--if you dare. 

A few notes about grading

In the old days, I used to proudly announce that I don't believe in grading creative work. It was part of my training. I went to schools where whatever I turned in to a CW class was given an A. And I can assure you, it wasn't because all my work was excellent. 

Over time, however, I've come to see that treating students as if they are all young geniuses who might be harmed by being corrected or edited is silly and maybe even lazy. In fact, such teaching isn't teaching at all but a great disservice. There is plenty to learn about writing, and plenty to call "mistakes" -- even though the mistakes might become something quite powerful if you really push them. But first you have to know what you're up to. 

This is why we draft and workshop. We draft, change, discuss and even argue about fiction in the classroom. (It's always good when there is real disagreement, as there was on Friday.) And I insist on small group workshops as you develop your stories. Mostly I am guiding you toward an understanding of fictional strategies--your own, your classmates', Ernest Hemingway's, and Selah Saterstrom's. Because I work on the theory that all writing is revision, I want you to be able to see what you do as mechanical even as we all know that good writing is inspired and can't really be quantified. Here, we have to quantify it. And I have to give grades. 

So for your stories I give one grade for the story and one for the mechanics--your grammar and punctuation. (Those quotations!) They are averaged together for your total grade, so poor punctuation can cost you. The first three stories won't count as much as the two you work on for the portfolio, but super low grades can be a problem. That's why I allow revisions to improve the grade.  

20 Lines A Day, Genius or Not

As mentioned in our first class, you will benefit enormously from a daily writing habit this semester. Just getting something (practically anything) on the page every day will help build your confidence with writing of all kinds. Daily writing will also result in an array of words, sentences and ideas to be foraged for the stories you're working on this semester.

I've always liked Stendhal's instruction to himself (partly because it's French, I admit it):

 Vingt ligne par jour, génie ou pas. 

However, one of my students this semester has done that pithy phrase one better. That's right, a student blogger has created a post full of smart ideas and links to others thinking about daily habits and especially daily writing--so do check it out. 

What Constitutes "Poetry du Jour," via Fence Mag's Constant Critic

I couldn't resist posting this excerpt from the Constant Critic's revue of Christian Hawkeye's new book, Ventrakl. The reviewer, Karla Kelsey, lays out a list of elements of "poetry du jour." Good to know.

In fact, a list of Ventrakl’s tactics and concerns will read as a description for what it is to be a book of poetry du jour:

Interest in translation, both as overtly stated theme and as mode of composition

Collaboration and a problematizing of monological authorship

Use of ekphrasis, both as an occasion and as a tool for prying into the nature of representation

Use and problematizing of biography, of how to represent a life

Interest in overtly exploring intertextuality

Explicit articulations of a poetics, while, at the same time enacting this poetics figuratively (or by rejection of figure), formally, extra-lexically

Recognizing the necessarily political implications of language, a weariness and despair of facile articulation

The hybrid (the book, part of UDP’s Dossier Series, includes lineated poems, prose poems, invented conversations, biographical sketches, photographs, and quotations)

Documentary poetics

Procedural poetry

The poetic project

The entire review is available here.