The Mag/pie

Link: Writing Operations & Recipes

Here's a link to a rich page of Writing Operations distilled, organized, & presented by Susan on her GMU web site.

Susan's entire collection of resources for writers and students - "Bouncing Off Walls" (sub-head "indoor sports for poets") - merits serious exploration. For now, I'm including the page on Writing Operations here because many of the exercises can be adapted for collaboration and collage. (Susan includes a notation besides those that suggest collaboration, or involve altered text or collage.)

The page is a handy list of definitions/explanations of various fun writing operations: Anagram, Lipogram, Cancelled Text/Erasure, Perverse, Breaking Words, N+7, Boolean Poetry, Analytic Dictionary Definitions, Translexical Translation, Exquisite Corpse Cut Up, and others. As Susan points out, many of the terms are defined and included in the Oulipo Compendium, but this page/cheat sheet/list sure makes it easy to browse and learn and pick one that might be fun.

[Note from the Department Against Self-Promotion: Susan doesn't know that I am featuring the page here. We've discussed how to get some of the information from her excellent collection of resources at GMU onto this blog, but I like this collection so much I simply decided to jump right in and link to it. Why not?]

-Adrian

A Dozen Tiny Poems

Recipe by Joe Hall, poems by Joe Hall & Cheryl Quimba

This is a relatively simple way to collaborate.

1. To begin, a list of 6 words is needed. I suggest that each person take a turn adding a word to the list. This way, the creative push and pull is present from the get-go. These words should be, ostensibly, unrelated.

2. Independently, each collaborator then writes six 3-word poems. Each of these poems must use a word from the list. (With articles and prepositions sprinkled in to taste, these poems can also be 4 words).

3. The 12 poems are then compiled in whatever order seems most compelling. Again, this process can be turn-based, with Collaborator A choosing the first poem, Collaborator B choosing the second poem, and so on.

The end result is something that reflects the play between two intelligences on an almost poetically microscopic scale.

Here's one result--

Wednesday -- Joe Hall & Cheryl Quimba

paraffin
coat
evenly

tallow tremble and paraffin

daffodil treble to husk

downpour
lest unhappy
treble

insouciant digital growth

sweet stroke
insouciant
slumber

flock here,
princely
diviner

flock unfolding in catalytic

cavalier gospel:
such outcry

converter hive gospel

wife shopper madcap

swing madcap
until dawn

Collage Recipe: Firsts and Lasts, Ones and Threes

Here's a collage recipe that results in a poem comprised of couplets (their number determined only by how many books you use).

It's a two-part process that will have you 1) opening every book to the same page and extracting two lines to create a couplet, and 2) imposing some kind of order on the lines that are subsequently, arbitrarily, collected. Here's how:

- Put together a pile books. (More than you'll end out using so that you can discard some once you begin. For ex: if you plan on 8, start with 12.)
- Pick a book (*more on this below).
- Turn to page 15 of the book.
- Extract the last line of the first paragraph on the page. This is the couplet's first line.
- Extract the first line of the third paragraph on the page. This is the couplet's second line.
- Repeat for each book in your pile, until you have extracted couplets from every book. Retain the order of the lines, first to last.
- (Optional: if you'd like, return to the first book and extract a single line from anywhere on that same page. Use this as the concluding line of your poem.)

There is such a high degree of arbitrariness to the above process that I try to balance it next with an imposition of my will on the raw material. To my tastes, collage works best when it strikes a balance between chaos and order, between random and reasoned. Here's how I find the balance, or force some order, in this method:

- Don't start randomly. Browse through the books looking for a strong opening line. Constrain yourself to page #15 and to extracting specific lines, but allow the freedom to read lines before choosing the first book.
- Try to weave a mosaic of books, somehow. The meaning is broad, but the general rule of thumb is: compile a set of books that somehow connect to each other (for ex., different sides of the same subject), or balance each other (different genres), or somehow -- anyhow -- weave a mosaic in the field of possibilities.
- Allow yourself the freedom to switch pronouns ("he" to "she" or vice versa, etc.) in order to establish some kind of narrative thread through the lines.
- Allow freedom with line breaks. In order words, feel free to sculpt the raw product of 8 or so couplets by choosing where, exactly, it might make more sense to use line breaks.
- Allow freedom to delete one or two words, if their absence improves things.
- Similarly, if it makes more sense, when extracting lines from your book, allow the freedom to take phrases instead of whole sentences. One couplet can run into the other. (The result is a series of couplets that are not self-contained, ghazal-like, but blend one into the other. A sentence begun in one book is ended in another.)
- If the lines you're using (last of first para, first of third para) are truly horrendous, don't use the book. Or, if a line nearby is amazing, use that instead. (Try not to do this for every book -- but if it must, let it happen).
- If you only have short lines, use as many of them as necessary to match the line length of the other couplets.

Example:

I wrote a series of these poems recently using "Africa" is a broad motif to guide the work. I found the most success when deciding carefully which collection of books to put together - what universe of possibilities to create. In one example, I had at least four books to do with the genocide in Rwanda - all different. One was a novel, another a collection of testimonials by survivors, another was Philip Gourevitch's moving book on the subject. I balanced this with a randomly chosen novel from a distinctly different region in Africa, as well as Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and a collection of Lawrence Weschler essays ("Vermeer in Bosnia") -- the eponymous essay to do in part with art and war crimes tribunals in the Hague. To me, so much of this work is about Representation, and the collection seemed to capture that. I switched a pronoun from "he" to "she" to connect an earlier image with a later couplet. And I took liberties with phrases and line breaks so that, for example, two distinct fragments from separate books came together as:

The dead/ looked like pictures of the dead and even then// under a continual threat of being overwhelmed once again."

(The result of this example will appear in Five Fingers Review 24 "Foreign Lands and Alternate Universes"...)

-Adrian

Quotations on Collage

“A good stealer is ipso facto a good inventor.”
-- Marianne Moore, notebook entry

"Collage construction enables images to become a form of thinking."
-- Charles Altieri, "The Objectivist Tradition."

[M]any diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, we shall prevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it is intended to call up.
--Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics

One uses form as a musician uses sound. One does not imitate the wood dove, or at least one does not confine oneself to the imitation of wood-doves, one combines and arranges one’s sound or one’s forms into Bach fugues or into arrangements of colour, or into "planes in relation.”
--Ezra Pound, on sculptural form

Collage composition, as it developed simultaneously in France, Italy, and Russia (and slightly later in Germany and Anglo-America) is distinguished from the "paste-ups" of the nineteenth century in that it always involves the transfer of materials from one context to another, even as the original context cannot be erased.
--Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment

Each cited element breaks the continuity or the linearity of the discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality. The trick of collage consists also of never entirely suppressing the alterity of these elements reunited in a temporary composition.
--Group Mu Manifesto

In our reading experience of quoting poems the formal properties of the quotation precede and define their conceptual content, showing that the quotation is indeed unparaphrasable. Texture asserts the idiosyncratic rather than the interchangeable. Texture does not just define the sounds of a group of words, it has consequences. It shows how these sounds point to and are part of those words’ individual, nonparaphrasable meanings. Texture also implies a quotation’s history, its past, “original” use and this original use’s earlier appropriations by culture.
-- Leonard Diepeveen, Changing Voices: The Modern Quoting Poem

-ST

Generating Page Numbers: Finding a Lexicon

Two recent posts about using GPS coordinates to "generate page numbers" - but what does that mean?

On collaborative collages we often - but not always - resort to the following method:

We each pick one book, to be used for the entirety of the poem. We create or "find" a list of page numbers. Each page represents a lexicon. We allow ourselves the freedom to use any and every word on that page for writing a line, a couplet, a stanza, whatever is required of us at the time.

There may be wrinkles or additional constraints, to be addressed in other blog entries, but in its simplest form this is how we use page numbers.

Open your book to that page. Use the words you find there to create your line or lines...

(Two methods for number generation: GPS coordinates and capital cities.)

Page Numbers, Titles, National Anthems, Abecedarium

Here's a wrinkle to the idea of using geographic constraint to generate page numbers for a collage. The recipe combines elements of abecedarium and location to generate page numbers and titles of poems in a series. How it works:

(Africa will be our example -- we regularly "use" Africa to find the way through our collaborations -- but you can establish any place you'd like.)

Abecederium:

- start by picking the name of a country beginning with the letter A (for example, Angola).
- obtain a copy of that country's national anthem (most found online).
- scan for a phrase that begins with the same letter you're currently using (in Angola's anthem we found: "As by our work we build the New Man").
- that phrase becomes the title of your first poem.
- for each poem in the series, repeat the process, using the next letter in the series (for us: b- Benin, c - Congo; d - Djibouti; e - Eritrea).

Page numbers:

- determine the capital city of the country (for ex., Angola = Luanda).
- establish the city's GPS coordinates. Those numbers are the page numbers you'll use for this particular poem in the series.
- repeat as above for the next poem: a new letter, the next country, its capital city, the relevant GPS coordinates.

This method of weaving geographic constraint through two elements of the collage - title and page number - is particularly satisfying for someone exploring, however obliquely, a sense of place.

Tip: Generating Page Numbers via GPS

Jumping right in, here's a method of using geographic constraint to generate page numbers for a collage project:

GPS coordinates.

Simple as that. Derive your page numbers from the lines of latitude and longitude that pinpoint your exact location on the earth. The information is available for free online - for example, via Google Earth (which requires you to download a small application).

Using GPS - or zip code, or area codes - or any number derived from physical location feels the opposite of arbitrary. You start a project feeling grounded, no pun intended, or perhaps even guided by some overshadowing sense of place - as vague as that might be.

And there can be happy surprises: In a recent collaboration - with Adrian in Northern California and Susan first in a Colorado ghost town then Northern Virginia - we learned that all three locations are roughly 38 degrees north of the equator.

This first recipe written from 37 54 10.16 North 122 32 22.78 West (there'd be little degree symbols after the first numbers if we knew how to include them in the blog).

About: The Mag/pie

With nest of mud and twigs, oft thorned. A bird famous for mimicry, for piracy, for hoarding small, bright objects, for chatter chatter chatter. Or, maybe a pie filled with ... what? Stick your finger through the crust, or read the recipe. A mag(net), a mag(azine), a mag(nifying) glass ... a closer look:

The Mag/pie is a blog about one of our great pleasures: poetic collaboration and collage. The site will serve as a clearinghouse for recipes, links, short essays, interviews, and anything we find useful as we explore collaboration and collage in our poetry.

Thank you for joining us.
Susan Tichy & Adrian Lurssen