Come and have a go if you think you're Bard enough!

By Ewan

Thu, 12 Mar 2009
  • 2411 reads
13 comments
 

Why cut-ups don't work....

As an experiment, I clicked on 'random story' 12 times, having arbitrarily decided on this shape of poem beforehand. I then took the titles as the lines of the poem. The DaDaists and other devotees of the random would have us believe that simply doing this can give us poetry. Perhaps you would agree with me, that in this case, it does not:

Egyptian cotton sheets...
your grave
u can't put me in a bottle
Nick at the station

Every breath you take
our love
reading over life
your future

examination
Life won't get me down
Z is for loneliness
Bag of weasels.

Okay, let's fiddle with it... already that's cheating, isn't it?

You can't put me in a bag of weasels,
our love is examination.
Your future; Egyptian Cotton sheets
your grave.

Bottleneck at the station:
every breath you take
reading over life won't get me down.
Z is for loneliness.

OK, it's sort of (extremely bad) poetry: easily as bad as the stuff created by the on-line poetry generators I'm sure we've all seen.

I'd be willing to bet if I'd chosen 100 titles and discarded 90, then had done some editing, the poetry would still have been dire.

Unless you know different; so - an unofficial IP or challenge – can you do better?

Certificate U
Opinion

Comments

Submitted by Ewan on
PS thanks to anyone who recognises their title amongst the nonsense above.

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Submitted by lenchenelf on
Oo, you clever munchkin Ewan,I doubt I could do better, but this is what fetched up when replicating your experimental methods and in the order it appeared, stanzas purely arbitrary, funny in itself :-) Dream of ex-lover New Labour my Arse Just Dessert Quest for a Hero second chapter And Then I am King Blondest Mode B) All For Me... Part 2 Quiet Werner Herzog Helped Joaquin Pheonix From A Car Wreck The Breath Of Life Don't Believe Untitled ...... Thanks for a morning smile :-) and yes, thanks to the Authors for their titles.

 

Submitted by Ewan on
Yes, it's odd isn't it? How they can turn out quite humorous? I don't dispute that it's possible to come across some good combinations of phrases purely fortuitously. I just believe that poets employing these techniques are being disingenuous about how much tinkering is required to produce something that is anything like good. Perhaps as long as it takes a real poet to craft a poem from scratch? (I don't include myself in their number by the way; I dash most things off and it shows :-))

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Submitted by chuck on
The Gysin/Burroughs method involved getting totally smashed on kief and majoun living in claustrophobic quarters among bits of cut-up paper everywhere which lay around for days until somebody noticed some kind of happy coincidence that looked amusing and may or may not mean something to someone somewhere in which case it might have got itself incorporated into something else that looked promising....the odds of getting a decent passage were about 99 to 1....until Ginsberg arrived to do the serious editing.

Submitted by Ewan on
Exactly.

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Submitted by chuck on
Sacrilege in some quarters. Though I must admit I quite like old Bill. He could be darn funny. He was just trying to deal with self-hatred and cut-ups was just one method he used.

Submitted by JimTovey on
I still need it to mean something. maybe we were wrong still of the rum tree Some things even I don't want to write about Merde Check your inner soul eyes were too of your now experienced well polished spots But who and where Sheeting down like B-movie special effects all that Michael could think of was Caroline but know I couldn't I wondered if perhaps taking the last line would make more sense to the process as titles could contain additional characters or more predictable phrases. - random nonsense plagerism if left unedited still

Submitted by chuck on
I think the underlying objective is escape from the Self. Relinquish control and let Fate do the writing. Then if you like the result you can take credit for it.

Submitted by chuck on
The cut-up technique suits your work well Wilky. It gives those pieces a mysterious fragmented atmosphere. I was also very impressed with the Assassin Sonnets...which was more linear I think.

Submitted by Ewan on
'In best Blue Peter tradition, here are some I made earlier:' I think all of these stand the 'is it poetry?' test well. I am pleasantly surprised that, of these, I like 'Life. On Mars' and 'Bad Night at the Charing Cross Sundown' best; given they were the ones where there was no editing of the original wording. How long did you take over them? I am genuinely interested, as I was intrigued to learn from Chuck that perhaps Burroughs spent a great deal of time sifting through an awful lot of material to produce worthwhile stuff. I am very surprised that not one of these was deemed worthy of some fruit. Equally, I totally understand your comment: 'Mostly, I've found it a useful way to kick-start my imagination by making connections that my 'normal' thought processes would never have established.' I've done it myself. Thanks for taking the time to comment, John. I have learned a lot from the comments on this piece and that makes it all worthwhile.

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Submitted by Ewan on
Jim, why not try it?

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Submitted by mykle on
I'm currently laid in bed with severe back pain (a re-occuring problem related to an accident in my army days). The pain killers help a bit but not half as much as playing with this - so many thanks Ewan! I can't concentrate very well and so I've probably missed some out... Maybe someone else can tidy it up. ----------------------------------------------------- Examination; reading over life, u can't put me in a bottle Make me into the perfect wife Oh, how I'd like to throttle... stop, Every breath you take, Turn your future,into your grave. Perhaps, our love, just needs a break Nick at the station, your goodbye wave remembering you and me and Keats the three of us making love 'neath Egyptian cotton sheets... Life won't get me down but it might make me frown. A bag of weasels it's become I miss your snore, I miss your mum Z is for loneliness, empty and numb So here's to Z's and a bottle of rum. Z's is snoring but what is a Z? It's 'one' the lonliest number you get in a bed.

Submitted by Yazmin on
This is a very good idea, why didnt I think of it! Hmmmm...

Yaz