Of the ways into poems, one way has reliably worked for me. A variant of the “cut-up” method, which I believe is traced to William S. Burroughs, it might be called negative erasures, or From Prose Chaos, or, after Duchamp, “With Hidden Noise.” Several years ago one could to receive hundreds of junk emails advertising Cialis and/or sup-prime mortgages. At first these emails were not filtered into junk at all. Later, the senders attempted to trick servers with odd typography and pasted-in wordlists. That the lists rode along the ads for pharmaceuticals and loan sharks lent them a certain hilarious, and also potent, quality. Signals of someone casting about and copy-pasting abounded, e.g. tiny floating bits of news articles or HTML from the sender’s own email program. Here’s one of the lists: Writing prompt:
Check out Duchamp’s piece “With Hidden Noise.” Think of the prose chaos in the wordlist as a skein of words surrounding a hidden subject—a noise. Because it’s made of words, the skein is never quite the same. The hidden noises are therefore many, emerging with your noticing (and notice). Whether your poem is “noisy” per se is up to you. It seems to me that noise is contingent on the state of capture: release cancels it out. Choose your blend of constraint + personal creative authority. Decide on adding connective words or whether to make changes according to the needs of the emerging poem. For example, if a word from the list proves to be not right, consider replacing it with a word that rhymes with it (another hidden noise).
0 Comments
I came across a copy of W.S. Merwin’s Lament for the Makers. It’s an anthology about the size of a 45rpm record, constructed as an elegy for some of the poets Merwin admired. The work of these poets—twenty three of them—comprises the anthology. It’s a nice basis for a book; embodying the title poem lends it certain come-to-life vividness. Constrained by brevity of lives and of presentation, he chooses unexpectedly from mostly familiar poets. Sylvia Plath’s “Words,” for example, caught my eye on the first flip-through. For Dylan Thomas, he offers “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” I didn’t know the poem myself, but right away the title indicated that it was going to be a difficult one to pull off. Dylan Thomas manages it. I found myself in the surprising position of reaching for an anthology to read more Dylan Thomas—it had been awhile. Michael Robbins writes of Dylan Thomas’s work that “self-seriousness is the major trope” (the whole short piece is worth reading). But in “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” Dylan Thomas enacts a kind of stepping down from proclaiming. He reveals a flip-side of self-consciousness. He sort of contrasts himself. Self-seriousness, meanwhile, to use Robbins’ more specific term, is seductive. As such, as a writer’s writer, Dylan Thomas can lure one into imitation—big mistake. Perhaps a writer-reader, from a conscious stance—at least specifically avoiding imitation—can use, burn, that intense energy, and produce something different. In any case, so prompted, I turned around and wrote some prompts. I might add one: create a selection of poets to anthologize, and explain your selection. Attempting to do that in a poem, as Merwin does, would be a real challenge, I think, especially for more than about seven of them*. But if you truly adore (or mourn) the poets you chose, it might work wonderfully. Bad Seed First read Dylan Thomas’ poem “The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.” In a letter, Thomas wrote: “I make one image…let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together; a fourth contradictory image, and let them all within my imposed formal limits, conflict. Each image holds within it the seeds of its own destruction, and my dialectical method, as I understand it, is a constant building up and breaking down of the images that come out of the central seed, which is itself destructive and constructive at the same time…” (as quoted in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry). The first stanza of the poem illustrates this technique, a complete ‘seed cycle’ within a formal limit: "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer..." Write a poem using this technique, or a variant of it. Adjust compression (the spacing of the contrasted elements) as needed and experimentally. Also, adjust the formal constraint (rhymes, stanza shape), or jettison it entirely. * Less Death’s Dominion First read “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” Write a poem so unexpected, that death shall have no dominion in it at all. The goal is to strain (or non-strain) to write not only with freshness (a familiar goal that in and of itself seems to yearn towards a writerly "death shall have no dominion" on its own), but literally to create an open, clear, deathless field or vista or space in which everybody has a star “at elbow and foot.” Is it possible? The interesting thing about Dylan Thomas’ poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” is the extent to which death does have dominion in it. For this exercise, however, the poem should be different; death will have no dominion in it, not even in paradox. It will be a poem from another world. * See the notion of "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," which suggests that humans can hold onto about seven new concepts at a time.
Pierre Etaix said of his comic films, “I never felt I was creating something important.” Perhaps the torn portrait of himself in the film Rupture is a working model for this type of artist. Once he sees his severed self in the ripped photo (ripped by an indifferent lover), he helplessly launches a series of intricate gags involving his writing desk. If only he weren’t an adult, his childlike struggles with pen nibs and ink blots could be fun play, not fraught. He’s played with by physics: gravity, flow—and by artifice: photos, stamps, a cigarette lighter in the shape of a gun. His pain plays out in the live deconstruction of his ego. The simplest actions become impossible. Even his deliberate-seeming death is unintentional. Does ecopoetics tell the artist to forget the ego, like this? To fall apart, in a rupture from the industrial art economy? It probably should. The amplified demands of identity, as in the persistent cultivation of career, seems anathema to the enmeshed, connected stance of a deep ecological poem. A return to health, of the earth and of the poet, in tandem, is our goal, but the ‘industrial’ poet’s fixation on career and ego gets in the way. Yet self-importance seems to be the zenith to which career naturally shoots, even unintentionally. Career, in turn, is the carrier of the artist’s work, what gets it noticed. But like large noticeable clown shoes, there’s something about career that is inherently comical. Should non-ecopoems, town and city poems, as it were, court comedy and absurdity then? They probably should. Clips from Rupture are hard to come by, but above is a clip from Etaix's longer film Yoyo. The egalitarian antics of this performing family seem to offer possible solutions to the 'industrial' or urban artist's dilemma. We say so-and-so is an important painter of 20th century Europe; so-and-so is a ‘leading’ writer in the Americas. Status rankings are broadly human, not limited to the art world, and are at least partly natural—but is an author-centric (as in, self-centered) model for art really all we can aim for? Bernard Krause, in The Great Animal Orchestra, describes the work of musicologist Louis Sarno, who recorded the songs of the Ba’Aka tribe in central Africa. Krause describes how these complex songs harmonized with natural forest calls of local wildlife, but changed with the introduction of ‘civilized’ noise. With the changes came new varieties of health crises. He relates Sarno’s observation that a return to physical health involved retreat into the deeper forest and the medicine of connected songs. A remedy did not involve cutting a recoding deal in a distant city. With much of art wedged firmly in the industrial model, how to freely thrive and still learn from other artists and from one’s predecessors? How to cheer up in the face of our apparent eco-illogical doom? Influence and imitation spill continuously into a cultivation of fame, or an abject fear of the lack of it. It is thus perhaps restorative to spend time with satirists, comedians and clowns. As remote as their charades seem to be from the wild dreams of nature, their stories do one thing reliably and powerfully: turn the urban world to jelly. Clowning brings down structures, snips the strict webs of fashion, sends all the up elevators down. High and serious art must devise revolutions, it seems, to liberate anyone more than an individual urban character. Satire, in contrast, has a certain intrinsic leveling power that naturally flows from a given state of crisis and excess. It is the stance of 'enough is enough.'
* Some films - comedies, satires and related. (Definitely a growing list, and the predominance of French language films is incidental— I've just been haunting that shelf lately at my local library.) L'iceberg - Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel, Bruno Romy The Fairy - Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel, Bruno Romy Le Havre - Aki Kaurismäki The Man Without a Past - Aki Kaurismäki Day for Night - Truffaut Jour de fête - Jacques Tati (Charming early film; interesting negative portrayal of then-novel automobiles). PlayTime - Jacques Tati The complete films of Pierre Etaix. The Taking of Power by Louis XIV - Roberto Rossellini Orpheus - Jean Cocteau (not comic, per se, though it has its moments, for reasons I explore here). Also, though I haven’t seen it, Song from the Forest (2013) traces Sarno’s career and looks fascinating. Trailer here. I kept encountering a certain gripe as I started, threw aside, and re-started The Letters of Pliny the Younger. Pliny chose which of his letters to publish, and I suspect that he inserted, in his lawyerly manner, the one excerpted here as evidence for a pet argument of his that re-emerges like a trickle in the dry prose: that he is, in fact, a funny guy. Who are you, to accept my invitation to dinner and never come? I have a good case and you shall pay my costs in full, no small sum either. It was all laid out, one lettuce each, three snails, two eggs, barley-cake, and wine with honey chilled with snow (you will reckon this too please, and as an expensive item, seeing that it disappears in the dish), besides olives, beetroots, gherkins, onions, and any number of similar delicacies. You would have heard a comic play, a reader or singer, or all three if I felt generous. Instead you chose to go where you could have oysters, sow's innards, sea-urchins, and Spanish dancing-girls. You will suffer for this—I won't say how." Reading the letters of the Younger Pliny, we start to understand that Pliny was not only Pliny, but also flinty, and wily—and thus we read on.
|
Susan ParrCorrespondences, incidentals, hypotheticals, visuals. I also hike. Archives
June 2023
Categories |