Experimental Poetry 9: Anarchic poetry

You want anarchy? You got it! Anarchy is a state of disorder caused by rejection of rules and authority. It is the basis of a number of art movements including Abstract impressionism, Surrealism, Dadaism and punk rock. Poetry too has its anarchic poets. Read for example Ezra Pound, James Joyce or e. e. cummings. The latter rejected the use of upper case letters, hence the alternative presentation of his name. Edward Estlin Cummings as I will present him, experimented mercilessly not only with words, but also the form in which they were presented. He even misused punctuation deliberately to create feelings of disorientation, fragmentation and unease. In short, cummings used just about every aspect of language to create atmosphere and hammer home his messages. 

Method 15: Syntactic Deviance. Here, there is a total lack of regard for the conventional. You really will need to step outside your comfort zone, and this is where most of you will give up. And yet, if you do pursue this avenue of experimentation, you'll discover new ways of presenting your art of poetry which might otherwise have passed you by. Forget all the rules of grammar and punctuation. Spell things differently. Create sentences without verbs. Turn the writing upside down. Write diagonally or in reverse. Be absurd in what you write. Everything and anything goes. 

For me, this is one of Cummings' best poems: It dwells on loneliness and has the metaphor (a leaf falling) inside the word loneliness. It is inventive, disruptive and unexpected. In short, it is anarchic poetry. It breaks all the rules, including fragmentation of the words to signify a slow falling of the leaf. 

Method 16: Morphological Innovation. This is where you might dispense with conventional words and create your own. You might like to take a word and extend it to convey a meaning. Delicious becomes un-delicious, or chocolate becomes chocolate-ness. Go even further and blend words together to make new ones, or neologisms. A rabbit's burrow becomes its rabbitat and agonising over the loss of your luggage becomes bagonising. Be inventive. There are no rules, and you'll create your own language of poetry! These new words are known as portmanteaus and they are a part of morphological innovation. 

Method 17: Ad Nauseum. This Latin phrase means 'until sick'. This is the point in your poetry where you can go completely out on a limb and do totally unpredictable stuff. And then do it again, and again, and again, until it sickens, and then keep doing it until you run out of paper. 

Steve Wheeler

Previous posts in this series

Experimental Poetry 1: Found Poetry
Experimental Poetry 2: Stream of Consciousness
Experimental Poetry 3: Fake Translations
Experimental Poetry 4: Overlapping Voices
Experimental Poetry 5: Random Prompts
Experimental Poetry 6: The Movie Method
Experimental Poetry 7: Unexpected End Rhymes
Experimental Poetry 8: Calligrams

Image from Wikimedia used under a Creative Commons licence.

Cut-up poetry

Have you heard of the Dada movement? It was an art movement that emanated from Europe back in the early part of the 20th Century. At the heart of Dadaism was the rejection of reason and logic in favour of spontaneity, the enjoyment of nonsense and irrationality. It was anti-art. It was anti-establishment. It was absurd. In short, they were all as crazy as a box of frogs. 

But it sounded like they had a lot of fun in the midst of an otherwise very dull society (in 1915 everything was in black and white).   

In the 1950s, over in the good ol' USA, the Beat Poets movement was just starting. One of the craziest members of this crazy gang of avant-garde poets and writers was William S. Burroughs, author of The Naked Lunch and other works. He rubbed shoulders with the likes of Jack Kerouac, David Bowie and Allen Ginsberg, but was also close friends with Brion Gysin, a British-Canadian painter, performance poet and inventor. 

Together Gysin and Burroughs developed the concept of the cut-up technique, which had its roots in the Dada movement. Cut-up involves taking a fully formed piece of text (or maybe several pieces) and cutting out text randomly, either in sentences, phrases or even single words. The cut-out strips can be assembled into a new piece of text. This can be done at random, or with purpose. 

There are many variations of this method. Someone on the blog yesterday posted a comment about word tiles and how they can inspire poetry. Throw them down and see what emerges. That's a great idea along similar lines to the above approaches. It can generate some powerful inspiration. 

I also developed my own technique around found poetry, which involves a similar method to cut-up but instead of snipping out the words, I use a highlighter pen to randomly select words and sentences within a piece of printed text and then creating a collage from them. This follows the bricolage method espoused by the likes of Claud Levi-Strauss, where you can 'do it yourself' bypassing normal techniques and gaining instant access to random creativity and inspiration. 

Yes, these are very post-modernist methods, but in the event of a road-block to your creativity, they might be just what you are looking for to restart your creative engine. Comments as ever, as most welcome.

Steve Wheeler

Image from Wikimedia Commons