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.

AI poetry: John Frum and the Cargo Cults of Mars

Prompt

Can you write a few verses, modelled after Bible verses, that reflect the theology of a cargo cult on Mars?

ChatGPT

Certainly! Here are a few verses inspired by the concept of a cargo cult on Mars:

Verse 1:

"In the barren lands of Mars, our eyes behold,

A fervent faith in cargo's worth, a story yet untold.

We gather 'round the Martian soil, our hearts ablaze,

Awaiting ships from distant skies, with wonders to amaze."

Verse 2:

"Our Martian prophets speak of days to come,

When ships descend from heavens high, and silence turns to hum.

With fervent hope, we offer praise, our voices raised on high,

To deities of metal birds, that soar across the sky."

Verse 3:

"Through red dust storms and ancient rocks, we stand as one,

Believers in the promised land, where cargo ships will come.

We toil and sweat, our hands at work, constructing sacred signs,

Guiding spaceships to our realm, as destiny aligns."

Verse 4:

"From rusted capsules, remnants left, we glean our lore,

Technology of ages past, the cargo we adore.

Yet deeper lies our quest for truth, in every metal shard,

A yearning for connection true, with beings from afar."

Verse 5:

"As Mars unfolds its mysteries, we seek to understand,

The cosmic dance of life and hope, guided by a grand plan.

In cargo's gleam, we glimpse a dream, a future yet unseen,

A unity of worlds entwined, where miracles convene."

ChatFPT:  Please note that these verses are fictional and created for the purpose of your request. They are inspired by the concept of a cargo cult on Mars and do not reflect any actual theology or religious practices.

Me:  No shit.

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....

Across the Wounded Centuries -- How an Enlightenment-Era Poet 'beat' Burroughs to the Punch by Nearly 200 Years....

Caleb Whitefoord, 1773 or 74.  Sir Joshua Reynolds

Over the years, I've come across several essays about how some of the earliest novels anticipate literary postmodernism's ideas and concerns.  To whit, Cervantes' conceit in Don Quixote (1605 & 1615) that the story is translated from an obscure manuscript....the totally black page, the Alfred Bester-like typographical oddities, the symbol representing how a character waves his cane in Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759 to 1767). To my regret, two novels I have not yet read.  And to my surprise, the latter book was inspired by....the former!

Today, I came across another example. One Caleb Whitefoord (1734-1810) - wine merchant, diplomat, and poet - discovered a novel way of reading the newspapers, that is to say, across the columns instead of down them.  In addition to finding the results amusing, Whitefoord, among others, pointed out that this method often revealed the unspoken agendas and contradictions of the newspapers.  It also pointed to a concern we don't often associate with the 18th century, but to our own:  media overload.  The populace was becoming more literate, and a welter of daily papers and monthly magazines, journals and reviews were there to supply the ever-growing demand.

Quote:

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. (from an interview with Paul Collins)

Coffeehouses, eh? Poets, coffee....and folk singers? Enlightenment Beats?

Some examples:

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

undertake a voyage round -

The head-dress of the present month.

Yesterday the new Lord Mayor was sworn in,

and afterwards toss’d and gored several Persons.

Notice is hereby given -

And no notice taken.

A perceptive essay by Giles Goodland about Whitefoord's texts can be found here.  All quotes and information about Whitefoord from this point on come from Goodland's essay, which I urge you to read.

Whitefoord first published what he called "cross-readings" in The Public Advertiser in an article entitled A New Method of Reading Newspapers (1766).  

He used this method again in the New Foundling Hospital for Wit (1770); more cross-readings also occur in various broadsides and ephemeral publications, now hard to trace, usually under his bye-line of 'Papyrius Cursor'.

Writing under this name in 1775 (Fugitive Misc. II. 49-51) he describes his work in a way that seems so modern in its insistence that the consumer of the media is powerless against a flood of contradictory messages from all spheres of an increasingly complicated and contradictory society, it is worth quoting from at length: (Goodland)

18th-Century prose is best read in its entirety, so instead of providing a snippet, please read the quote yourself.  Goodland provides a few more examples:

The comet is now on it's return to the sun—

pursuant to a decree of the high court of chancery.

At the meeting at Newcastle, Sir B. F. D. was in the chair—

and appeared like a dull, faint nebulous star.

Yesterday there were violent disputes in the common-council—

For some time past the volcano has been extremely turbulent.

Now in rehearsal the distrest mother, a tragedy—

Occasioned by the undutiful behavior of the Colonies.

Lucius Papirius Cursor, btw, was a much-vaunted Roman politician and general who Livy compared to Alexander the Great.  As many of Whitefoord's texts were political in nature, perhaps he's mocking the puniness of contemporary politicians by comparison?  Or perhaps it's ironic self-aggrandizement?  Contemporaries would have known the reference, but why he chose this nom de plume, I'm not sure.... 

Apparently, Whitefoord's cross-readings were quite popular and luminaries such as Horace Walpole, Oliver Goldsmith, and Dr. Johnson found them both ingenious and hilarious.  An anonymous broadside from 1782 describes them in terms that, for me anyway, cannot but evoke the basic principles of Surrealism:

One particular species of entertainment resulting from [reading newspapers], is, after reading each column by itself DOWNWARDS, to read two columns together ONWARDS: whereby chance will bring about the most unaccountable connections, and frequently couple persons and things the most heterogeneous; things so opposite in their nature and qualities, that no man would ever have thought of joining them together.

I added the boldface.  It's as if the author had anticipated Lautréamont by 100 years, he who so inspired Surrealist aesthetics with the following line from Canto VI of Maldoror:

He is as handsome as....the chance juxtaposition of a 

sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!

Goodland concludes:

It was striking to me that I could find no reference to Whitefoord or cross-readings in any studies of the roots of modernism. It seems to me that the work of Whitefoord is an important precursor of styles and poetries that would later be called avant-garde, at least in the fact that he stumbled by chance on Tristan Tzara's famous recipe for a Dada poem ('take a pair of scissors and a newspaper...'). The similarity is not only one of methodology. The humour in these juxtapositions depends on an understanding of class inequalities, the contradictions and aporia of party politics, and not least how easy it was – a mere matter of skipping over a thin white column – to expose the contradictions inherent in the mass media, and the interests they represent.

Burroughs, 1960: hey-day of the cut-up period

What strikes me is that Goodland mentions Tzara, but there is an even more direct example in the work of American author William S. Burroughs.  He did exactly the same thing with newspaper texts, and for pretty much the same reasons, as Whitefoord, almost precisely 200 years later.  Well, not exactly.  Whitefoord produces what read almost like headlines, or single epigrammatic phrases; Burroughs produced sustained texts.  Burroughs' texts are also generally more disjointed.  Perhaps Whitefoord was a bit more selective, or not as beholden to pure chance, meaning that he pruned the excerpts, adding or removing articles, conjunctions, whatever he required for a more coherent read.  Goodland suggests that some of the texts are not entirely found, but constructed.  Perhaps Whitefoord didn't feel as beholden to chance as Burroughs did; he wasn't, after all, striving to predict the future or break through control mechanisms, but produce witty and satirical observations about contemporary politics.

As he himself put it 

Whenever any change on [sic] Ministry happen'd, and the Party Writers on both sides began the work of serious abuse, I have always endeavour'd to make such changes a matter of Laughter rather than of serious concern to the people, by turning them into horse Races, Ship News, &c.

Burroughs experimented with cut-ups and fold-ins, and many variations of the "three column" format; some of the results can be found in The Burroughs File (1984).  This book, my first exposure to Burroughs, incidentally, is a collection of previously-published small books that were themselves often collections of short pieces he'd published in "little magazines," or mimeos, between 1962 and 1969.  A collection, then, of collections.

The book contains two examples from The White Subway (1973):  Who is the Third that Walks Beside You?  and a re-mix of sorts, Who is the | Walks Beside You | Written 3rd?

Another book included is The Old Movies, again providing two examples:  So Who Owns Death TV  and The Moving Times.  If I understand correctly, most of these pieces were originally collected into a German edition called Die Alten Filme (1979) and made available in English for the first time in The Burroughs File.

And all this is just the very tippy-top of the iceberg.  As Alex Wermer-Colan says in his introduction to the collection of Burroughs cut-ups he edited entitled The Travel Agency is on Fire:

[Burroughs] committed over a decade of his life to searching out every multimedia potential to produce works as collage....

He notes that the archive he drew upon 

...contains approximately 11,000 pages of unpublished material.  During my research, it became evident that a significant proportion of these texts went through the cut-up process.  These range from three-by-three textual grids to faux newspapers composed of headlines with three parallel columns of cut-up texts.  In addition archival collections at Arizona State University and Ohio State University suggest that even more cut-up material exists.

Most of these pages date from 1959 to 1965, nearly 200 years after Whitefoord had discovered the cross-reading method.  As far as I know, Burroughs was never aware of his literary ancestor.  Any discussion of the cut-up method invariably brings up Tzara's Dadaist forays into aleatory texts pulled from a hat, but nowhere have I ever seen Whitefoord's name in the plethora of essays about and biographical sketches of Burroughs or the method's actual "discoverer," Brion Gysin.  (Gysin was cutting mounts for some drawings and found that the newspapers he'd laid down had produced new texts that he, like Whitefoord, found hilarious.)  For Burroughs, cut-up literally became a weapon for destroying control mechanisms and predicting the future.  As Wermer-Colan points out, there are three collections of this material, one of which exceeds 11,000 pages.  Burroughs was not dabbling, but deadly serious.  There are thousands of pages of cut-ups, and probably thousands of his own "cross-readings" in those archives

Was Burroughs possessed?  Maybe he was, as Mailer points out, "by genius."  He himself felt he was possessed by an "Ugly Spirit" that led him to shoot his common law wife, Joan Vollmer.  I can't say if he was possessed, but he was certainly obsessed, and for all his brilliance and indeed, prophetic wisdom, he was prone to all sorts of crank ideas:  Reichian orgone boxes, Streiberesque alien abduction fantasies, and using cut-ups to predict, and change, the future.  In a way, he did predict and change the future.  But thousands of pages of cut-ups, years worth of activity....well, I admire the dedication and find it inspiring.  But man.  It's a little bit mad as well!

So, nothing new under the sun.  Burroughs knew about Tzara's aleatory use of found text, but he also advocated lifting whole sections of text; he suggests, for example, using descriptions of the jungle found in say, Joseph Conrad, and recycling them into one's own work.  Alas, even that idea had been used 100 years earlier by Lautréamont, who used descriptions of animals and their behavior from natural history encyclopedias in passages throughout Maldoror.  This does not undermine Burroughs' stature as a literary innovator.  He may have been familiar with Tzara, but was Lautréamont's intertextuality known in the US at that time?  And Burroughs certainly didn't know about Whitefoord.  Burroughs found ideas and twisted and tweaked them until he'd used every possible variation and squeezed out their last vital drops.  It's been said with some mirth that he is probably the only person who profited more from Scientology than they profited from him; indeed, his collaboration with filmmaker Antony Balch, The Cut Ups, even uses some of their proprietary auditing questions as a soundtrack!  

Burroughs' influence on contemporary culture is enormous, far-reaching and widespread.  Interesting, then, that 200 years before this gentleman junky rocked the world and took the novel to its limits with his cut-ups and fold-ins, a largely forgotten London merchant, a friend of Benjamin Franklin no less, invented the technique Burroughs would use for the better part of a decade for many of the same reasons as his literary forebear; to "deconstruct" the media and lay bare its hidden messages and agenda.  

One could argue that "cross-reading" was a technique to "fight back" against a news business that at times could be confusing and overwhelming, and where, absent direct experience, one had to trust what was communicated via the written word from a multitude of often contradictory sources.  After centuries of one authoritative text, the Bible, the written word was still an extraordinarily powerful medium, which in turn made the oft-dissonant chorus of newspapers disorienting.  This was why Burroughs sought to "rub out the word" and diminish the power of those who wielded it as a tool of control.  

England in 1766 was not yet a "Society of the Spectacle," but the era was the beginning of the modern nation state, of urbanization, the Industrial Revolution, and corporate Capitalism.  It was a time when nature was being organized into rigid taxonomies, defined as it were; when dictionaries and grammars were codifying and standardizing language into right...and wrong.  Right of course,  being the language of London's emerging upper middle classes.  Not aristocrats or landed gentry, but the merchant class, like Whitefoord himself.  While not unique to England, the link between one's language and one's social class is more openly, and perhaps more deeply felt in England than say, in France or the US, where égalité and "all men are created equal" are explicit state values.  By 1766, the written word had long been liberated from the Catholic Church, Gutenberg had taken care of that.  But the written word was  no less potent.  Broadsides, tracts, and pamphlets were very powerful indeed.  This was one reason for the Stamp Act of 1765; an attempt to limit the publication of incendiary tracts, to limit the growth of the professional classes, and to squeeze money out of the North American colonies.  The Act was repealed after less than a year due to violent protests, and is generally regarded as one of the leading causes of the American War of Independence. 

While on one hand the Stamp Act in part sought to quell the revolutionary potential of print media, the era was also the beginning of the newspaper business, in which the dissemination of information was inexorably linked with Capitalist interests.  Who knows exactly how the decline of print media will affect us down the line; but at the time Burroughs discovered cut-ups, the mainstream print media was still very authoritative and for him, a potent tool of control; as such, it was a target.  In 1766, Whitefoord might have been using cross-reading to satirize the newspaper business; in 1966, Burroughs wanted not only to destroy the newspaper business, but the written word itself....

Maybe in some ways the "cross-readings" were just a whimsical form of "fake news," a piss-take.  Ye Olde Onion, as it were.  But as with all satire, the humor contained a very real criticism of business as usual.  It's tempting to say Whitefoord was ahead of his time, but I think he came at exactly the right time.  Like the novels of Cervantes and Sterne, his readings say:  "don't trust everything you read."  Just when the news business began to flourish, he was there to signal caution, to say "read between the lines," to be skeptical.  The postmodernists rediscovered what their literary ancestors had already surmised.  Maybe Whitefoord was being whimsical, but he certainly had more of a purpose than humor alone.  Which is not to denigrate humor - au contraire - it reminds us not to underestimate the value of humor as a rhetorical tool.  Humor is another quality Burroughs shared with Whitefoord.  

Now, if someone smarter than I would connect all of this with the Lettrists, the Situationists, and the concept of détournement, we might just have a Ph.D. thesis in the making....come to think of it, they knew the value of a good joke as well....