Christian Bök describes his poem “Vowels” as an “anagrammatic text.” It builds itself out of permutations of the letters of the title. Write a poem according to the same principles. Your title should be a single word.
VOWELS
loveless vessels
we vow
solo love
we see
love solve loss
else we see
love sow woe
selves we woo
we lose
losses we levee
we owe
we sell
loose vows
so we love
less well
so low
so level
wolves evolve
When semantic meaning is eclipsed all sorts of other meaning come out of hiding. In our first class I wanted to get students thinking with their ears about vocables — oral sounds — apart from the meanings we like to grant certain of the shapes they take (words). It’s hard to explain but easy to experience.
I started them off with scat singing (always defined in terms of “nonsense” vocables — slanderous) by Louis Armstrong —
and Ella Fitzgerald:
Only a brute would deny there’s meaning there. Not the sort of meaning we mean when we say “I understand what that means.” Much closer to the meaning we mean when we say “you mean a lot to me.” When someone reaches out to someone and makes contact — that’s a meaning.
We moved on to Christian Bok’s performance of Hugo Ball’s Karawane (a more gravelly doing than the one I played in class):
In some spots it’s a little referential and a lot mimetic — jolifanto calling to mind swaying circus elephants. But at the core it’s what the Russian Futurists called zaum or beyonsense — expression released from reference so its sensuous and esoteric possibilities can unfold. Sometimes comically, as here, and sometimes not.
Some meaning is had. Some meaning is been. And some meaning is done. Our focus here is sound, but I can’t resist a bit of vision, how Ball’s poem steps out to the eye:
Anyway, my students did great with this weird trio, pointing out connections to the proto-articulations of infants (which mean nothing communicable but everything to mom and dad) and the science in non-Western cultures of the spiritual efficacy of sound.
And, less esoteric, the noises we make to get something immediate, embodied, across. Ahhhhhhhh. Oh! Hmmmm.
Okay, the move’s mostly made, still a bit of unpacking to do, but we’re up and running.
I’m teaching two sections of Intro to Creative Writing this fall. A course I’ve taught lots before but doing a thorough reno on it this go through. Less on core concepts and genre conventions. More on creative mischief and sideways mindleaps. The old version was good on fundamentals but kinda sobersided. And at Western this course isn’t a gateway for creative writing concentrators who need to learn all that good stuff. Rather it’s an elective taken by a lot of non-majors and future elementary and high school teachers. Who’re going to want some ways to get their students excited about the creative import of their own minds.
The first thing they learn about the course (after my office hours):
First premise. There is no one who is not creative. To make art—to sing, dance, shape sound, movement, language, or paint, any medium—is a birthright, as natural to us as our powers of speech and affection are. Second premise. We have not always been well served by our schooling. School may have, in fostering some of our capacities, estranged us from others. Most of us were probably better poets at six than at sixteen. Tentative conclusion. It is one task of a creative writing course—especially an introductory course—to rekindle the spark that connects, not A to B, but Q to oranges, mosses to stars. I don’t know exactly what this course will be—I see it as a work in progress and collaborative—but I hope you’ll feel more awake to being-alive-here-now for having taken it.
Heavy. Time for a foolish picture.
And so our itinerary is, one stop per week —
Sound
Word
Phrase
Line
Sentence
Image
Paragraph
Figure
Person
Shape
My posts will probably fall out likewise.
Awright, all y’all, I’m toying with a move from Tumblr to WordPress, and the mess of the move is already all over. Please feel free to wander but don’t judge us by the cardboard on the floor or the packing peanuts in the Brita filter.
OMG that’s beautiful. Just checking links on my CV and came to it. Splash Image © Lenguarayada (Tongue Twisted). Blanka Amezkua, 2009. And here’s their very fine journal.
From bombmagazine:
Seven posters from The Singing Posters: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl by Allen Ruppersberg (Part I), 2003, 14 × 22 inches.
These are pretty. Got nothing much more to say than that right now. Oh and they bring bill bissett’s hypercool phonemes to mind. Oh and they confirm that each line of “Howl” really is a page —
One more from Barb (she’s on a tear).
And transcription:
(old men)no books (3)
on is made in Was—
of the Mone.
Man how pear trees
settle power
to see and believe.
(such
dire
need)
I think I mentioned I came up with this exercise 10 minutes before the first meeting of my Art of Compost class this summer when I saw in my notes “exercise: something with torn pages” and realized I hadn’t worked out what “something” was.
William Carlos Williams famously wrote, “write carelessly, that nothing that is not green survives.” Not sure the same always applies to lesson planning but here it worked okay.
The pages we tore in class were from a battered second copy I had of his Imaginations.
by Barbara Nickel:
Which transcribes to:
(old men)no books (2)
to River
all—
congregation of al:
the ren, her
child
consecrate;
the tabl, her,
a cat, its way
Sorry been so long away folks. Working on some picture poems. Here’s one, they’re silly. The poem that goes with it:
IMAGO
Angry hunger
terror laugher
Meadow quiet
milk fragment
Caitlyn assembled a source text from found material and then performed an erasure on it to generate
EVE
She thinks this is
morning, “I’ve got my
things, I’m on the
verge.”
Guess
I have
you
breathing.
Finally, this
two to one
static:
I swim across an
ocean
from an empty
room.
(Erased from a base text made of the first words of each song on the album Everything in Transit by Jack’s Mannequin.)
One thing I really like here: how the poem combines (composts) two time-honoured practices — the found poem and the erasure poem — in a way that feels seamless and self-assured.
The Art of Compost 