The The Sound and The Shape: Notes for an expo of collaged poetry

These are are notes I made for a more elaborate essay that never really gelled.  It's still a decent starting point for a look at found, concrete, and other forms of "visual" poetry.

Letters of the alphabet are images, symbols that indicate a sound.  Or not.

Strung together as written or printed words, letters communicate meaning via the eyes, not the ears.  Hence, what sound letters represent ceases to be important when reading.

But language is both visual and aural.  But neither is essential: the deaf communicate, as do the blind.

The deaf communicate visually, the blind aurally, and by touch.  

Communication can occur  via eyes, ears, or fingers.  Whatever conduit leads to the brain.

Hieroglyphics are letters of a sort, abstracted forms referring to nature: birds, plants, people, rivers. More complex than a simple letter, each one is a word unto itself.

Chinese pictograms are complex letters that might refer to a sound, or an entire word. "Tree" in English requires four letters. In Chinese, just one pictogram does the job.

Letters have an attached phoneme.  What a letter looks like and what it sounds like are two different things. Slam and rap lean on rhythm, meter: sound. Concrete or visual poetry leans on how letters or words look, are arranged, their relationship to the page. Like any collage, concrete poetry can be representative or abstract.

Both visual/concrete poetry and poetry more concerned with sounds may or may not be concerned with "meaning."

Asemic writing refers to writing without any semantic content. It is a purely visual medium and may use invented letters or glyphs, or existing letters.

 "Ph" = "F".    Philosophy = Filosofia

Sofia. Sophia. The relationship between sound and its visual representation is not fixed.

Does the Sator Square qualify as poetry?  Was it just a word game, a clever use of symmetry?  Did it have cosmic significance?  Magick? 

The oldest known square was found in Pompeii and thus predates the town's destruction in 62 CE.

S A T O R

A R E P O

T E N E T

O P E R A

R O T A S

Simmias of Rhodes Axe. 300 BC?

These texts were called carmen figurata. In addition to Axe (Pelekys), Simmias produced Pteryges (Wings), the Soon (Egg).

So called altar poems were of the same nature but the text represented an altar. Examples date back to antiquity.

Altar poems and the carmen figurata are essentially concrete poetry.

They form a recognizable image that is evoked by the words by which it composed.

1653

George Herbert Easter Wings

This would be reproduced in the 20th century by Apollinaire with his Calligrammes.  Apollinaire was considered avant-garde, but his method dated back to before the Common Era. 

Here words are used to form a picture, but it's still not exactly using words themselves like elements of a collage.

18th C.

William S. Burroughs experimented with text arranged into columns to mimic newspapers. He also read across columns and strung the fragments together to create new sentences. The technique differed from his cut-ups and fold-ins but was basically the same thing. Finding new sentences embedded in texts by rearranging fragments. However....

1760's....Caleb Whitefoord - wine merchant, diplomat, poet - and London neighbor and friend of Benjamin Franklin, was doing a form of cut-up in the late eighteenth century:

It was Whitefoord’s genius to notice that when you took a broadsheet newspaper of tightly set columns, and started reading across the paper’s columns—rather than reading down to the column’s next line—you could achieve what he described as “coupled persons and things most heterogeneous, things so opposite in the nature and qualities, that no man alive would ever have thought of joining them together.” Whitefoord called this cross-reading, and he was so amused by it that he would publish sheets of his favorite specimens and hand them out to friends in Fleet Street coffeehouses.

Dr. Salamander will, by her Majesty’s command, 

undertake a voyage round—

The head-dress of the present month.

Wanted to take care of an elderly gentlewoman—

An active young man just come from the country.

Yesterday the new Lord Mayor was sworn in,

and afterwards toss’d and gored several Persons.

Removed to Marylebone, for the benefit of the air—

The City and Liberties of Westminster.

Notice is hereby given—

And no notice taken.

Burroughs did exactly that and cut-ups and fold-ins mimic the process.  

1868-70

Isidore Ducasse/Lautréamont

Maldoror included lines lifted directly from previous texts, especially descriptions of nature. As Burroughs said:  if Josef Conrad had described a treeline perfectly, why not just lift the text and use it as the background for the action in your text, much like collage?

In artistic practice, there is a history of repurposing and plagiarism that predates the digital. The pseudonymous Comte de Lautréamont, a French poet who died in 1870, whose work later influenced the Surrealists and Situationists, said:

"Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it. Staying close to an author’s phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas."

A man of his word, Lautréamont plagiarised in his two major works: Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies.

1914 Constantinople, a 'ferro-concrete poem' from Tango with Cows by Vasily Kamensky.

1918 Apollinaire Calligrammes.

Made poems to resemble the subject. Rain, for example.  Very much in the vein of Herbert.

1920

How to Make a Dadaist Poem

(method of Tristan Tzara)

To make a Dadaist poem:

• Take a newspaper.

• Take a pair of scissors.

• Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.

• Cut out the article.

• Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.

• Shake it gently.

• Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.

• Copy conscientiously.

• The poem will be like you.

• And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) and John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy (1930-36)

Incorporated newspaper clippings.

Burroughs and Gysin, Cut-ups, 1950’s & 60's

The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 … one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different–(cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise) — in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Heresay, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like.

The Nova Trilogy (1961-1967)

Minutes to Go 1960

The Exterminator 1960

The Burroughs File

Letters are represented by symbols and colors.

The Travel Agency is on Fire 

The editor says there are three collections of cutups that may number 11K+ pages each....

There’s been a lot of [objections to the cut-ups], a sort of a superstitious reverence for the word. My God, they say, you can’t cut up these words. Why can’t I? I find it much easier to get interest in the cut-ups from people who are not writers—doctors, lawyers, or engineers, any open-minded, fairly intelligent person—than from those who are….People say to me, “Oh, this is all very good, but you got it by cutting up.” I say that has nothing to do with it, how I got it. What is any writing but a cut-up? Somebody has to…*do* the cutting up. Remember that I first made selections. Out of hundreds of possible sentences that I might have used, I chose one

Oulipo

Lettrisme

Situationism

Fluxus

All these movements experimented with language, asemic writing, concrete poetry.

1964-1965 Charles Henri Ford Poster Poems

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/134480

Concrete Poetry

Postwar Brazil

d.a. levy

From Levy's Tibetan Stroboscope. 

 

Levy wrote poetry but experimented a lot with concrete poetry.  In the Stroboscope, he experimented with what he called "destructive writing.". Burroughs exhorted readers "trop rub out the word" but his cut-ups still used words. In his journals he went further and replaced words with symbols or different colored dots.  But until his scrapbooks are published we can only find some examples in The Burroughs File.

Levy achieved a similar goal in the Stroboscope poems.  By over inking his mimeograph machine or overprinting text, he arrived at what looked like text but was in fact illegible.  An example of asemic writing.

1967E  Emmett Williams Anthology of Concrete Poetry

Gysin's permutations

Visual Poetry

John M. Bennett

Sound Poetry

1960 Pistol Poem Gysin

Pure sound. Found sound. Asemic writing. If language is both visual and aural, isn't using sampled sound akin to using some words in found texts (or vice versa)?

1970’s

Bowie and the Stones used cutups for lyrics, under Burroughs’ influence.

1980's

Hip-Hop and EDM: Sampling. See: Pistol Poem (Brion Gysin)

2007

Jonathan Lethem The Ecstasy of Influence

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .—John Donne

Emojis.  Acronyms: WTF, LOL, LMFAO, IMO, etc.

Blackout Poetry

John Carroll

Austin Kleon

Take a text and start blacking out words until a poem is formed by the remaining words.

Some trace this back to Whitefoord, through Tzara and Burroughs. It's not the exact same technique, but a variation on manipulating a found text to create something new. Whether using fragments cut from a paper, or words left after redacting a text with a sharpie, or lifting paragraphs to re-use in one's own text.

Is it plagiarism or theft? I think not.. No because the origin of the texts is clear. There's no attempt to "fool" the reader. In fact, that the texts are found is part of the attraction.

The Blood (& Tools) of a Poet

In the Romantic imagination of many, the tools of the poet's trade are a quill, a piece of parchment, a tallow candle, and perhaps a glass of absinthe or laudanum.  And of course, plenty of inner torment.  

from Ode to my Unique and Deeper Anguish than Thine.

Hand held to head in squalid garret,
bat flying through etched lines where it -  
the guttering candle - meets darkness, 
the fetid air and cold and dampness. 
The pattering of brazen rats' feet.
Across the bed and through the sheets;
A whore's forgotten kerchief to mop sweat 

from a syphillitic brow, creased with regret.... (yadda cetera)

These days, the scene is more likely a laptop, a lamp from Ikea named Ljusfnord, an IPA, a thesaurus, a healthy dose of egotism, and a check from home.  And that's not a jab.  Half of Baudelaire's letters to his mom were pleas for money.  I can relate to that. 

                                                        

Jump (might as well):  Pictur'd above is the toolkit I use when I assemble my poems.  It is the toolkit I use to disappear.  I'm not a poet but something like an assembler on auto-pilot.  A cross between a factory worker and a kid with Elmer's glue, glitter, and macaroni.

I don't like poetry readings, most contemporary poetry, slam, the da-duh-daaaa cadence of "spoken word...." and poems with gentle humor about lakes, the hoot of an owl at vanilla sexual climax, a room in the Catskills to escape the noise and the smells of the Big Apple, he a mid-level advertising executive who still occasionally ekes out a poem, she a non-tenured Associate Professor of English who leads creative writing workshops on Riker's Island.  (Note to self:  call the city historian, find out if the portrait in the warden's office is avec or sans beard....Make it so.)  I should add that while I don't care for slam, in fact it annoys me, I respect many a slam poet's skills, and one can't denigrate a concept - poetry as verbal joust, a competition - that dates back to the Jocs florals (Floral Games) of the troubadours, established by the Consistori del Gay Saber in Toulouse in 1324.  That's a year shy of 700 years ago....

The Consistori still exists, now called the Acadèmia dels Jòcs Florals and is thus the oldest literary association in existence.  I guess the name isn't the only change.  The original Consistory would have spoken a dialect of what is now called Occitan but was also widely know as Provençal, and it was later very much involved in the promotion, standardization, and preservation of Occitan.  But their website is in French, without even a Occitan translation.  UNESCO classifies many Occitan dialects as "seriously endangered."  You know that's not alarmist when an organization historically engaged with the preservation of a language doesn't even present itself in that language.  It's like the coal mining museum in Kentucky coal country that is powered entirely by solar energy! 

My "poetry" influences are pop songs, advertising slogans, proverbs, clichés; fragments of text from spam, torn pieces of paper, TV guide episode descriptions*, or from Sappho of Lesbos.  I've also been known to drop in song lyrics or fragments of conversation I overhear while writing.  

*Due credit to artist T.A. Wilson, who found the following example hilarious. (As do I).  Anyone who's seen the episode will know exactly which show and episode is being referred to.  I can say without irony that this single sentence is an extremely efficient description and is a "flash poem" of some genius.  

"Kira tries to dislodge a stubborn Bajoran."  

Seven words perfectly summarize an entire episode.

I do not ignore authorial intent, but I do place high value (not "higher") upon a reader's (mis?)understanding; "meaning," such as it is, is an interplay between the writer and those who read him/her/them.  A person's take on any given text may in fact be a total misunderstanding of what a writer intended to say.  So what?

I don't think cut-up, fold-ins, cross-reading or any other "scissorial compostions" a) are weapons against control b) predict the future c) are harmful plagiarism.  They are, however, F-U-N fun and useful.  Scissors and glue bring a childlike sense of wonder back into the oft-dreary niche that some poetry can be.  Even when it isn't, but especially when it is.

"Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It holds tight an author’s phrase, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, and replaces it with just the right idea."

                                                                                        - Isidore Ducasse Poésies II (1870)

I have hundreds of "non" cut-up/concrete/visual/asemic poems, but to be honest, I'm more fond of my concrete and found poetry these days.  The following are a set of five unique books of concrete poetry with collage elements, burns, tears, paint splatters and washes, coffee washes, folds and crumplings.  Each one is unique.  The copy on the left was designed to be as ugly as possible!

Anyway, all this came about after I was inspired by the sight of my "tools" laid out as I was looking through my collages.  Pure narcissism.  That and I'm working on a short summary of concrete, visual, and cut-up poetry, along with other forms of found and collage texts, asemic or otherwise.  I intended this post to be one photo and a sentence or two, but it just kept going.  My brain is trying to make sense of a long and diverse branch of "poetic endeavors."

BTW, I'm willing to sell any of these works.  If anything catches your eye and you'd like a better picture, please leave a comment.  Some of these have already been shown in one of my Milk Coma (with collaborator Metapinto) shows (2013 at Pavillions Sauvages or 2016 at Café Le Burgaud).

One day I'd like to scan all of my collages and collage poetry, but that will be a pretty monumental task.  If that monument were small and insignificant....

William Carlos Willliams is said to have said

"It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

A lot of poets share that opinion.  Of course they would.  It defends and renders important an art which is, when not ignored, derided by our culture.  I tend to think it's bullshit.  Or maybe not.  There's a dearth of poetry in the American Agora.  But no dearth of dickheads, crypto-fascists, and mass shootings (600 + this year so far.  Winning!)  Writing poems, or in this case, cutting and pasting them together, well, at the very least one can say that there are worse ways to spend one's time....