Pushing the Boundaries

Yesterday I was in the studio recording a series of short radio shows in my Poets Corner slot for CrossRhythms Radio. The show is divided into two short sections with a music track played in between. In the first section I provide some background and context for my poem choice, and in the second section I perform the poem. It's simple but effective and the shows go out every weekday afternoon. 

In one of my shows yesterday I talked about experimental poetry and told the story of how I became interested, and then inspired by avant garde poets and writers. Here's the story again for those many of you who will never get the chance to listen to the show.

I was in my late teens, and had been writing poetry for a short while during my school years. Now in my first job at a local college, I was seconded for a week or so to work in the college library. It was quite a large library in several floors, and the book stacks were huge. One of my tasks was to preserve some of the paper back books by removing their covers, and then rebinding them in hard covers, with the original paper outers incorporated into the new cover. It was fun, although fiddly, and I always managed to get my fingers covered in glue. 

During this time, the library was disposing of many of its old stocks of books. These included poetry and other literature. I spotted a pile of old poetry books and asked one of the library staff what was happening to them. She replied that they were being thrown out, and that if I wanted any I should just take them. I carried a boxful home with me, and I still have most of them in my collection. 

Some that caught my eye included works by e. e. cummings, Charles Bukowski and Philip Lamantia. These great American poets wrote amazing out-of-left field poetry that left me gasping for breath. I never knew that the English language could be manipulated in such inventive ways! Then I read the work of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who created vast lyrical landscapes of metaphors, similes and wordplay that inspired me even more.  

Soon I began to write in similar ways, not in blind slavish copying, but through experimentation and trial and error. I began to perform my new experimental poetry live, and got more positive responses than I did negative ones (you'll always get both). I'm now at the point in my poetry life where I feel I can push the boundaries continually to try to find new ways of experessing myself and new ways of manipulating the English language to create new wordscapes. 

My interactive textbook Creative Deviance and more recently my poetry collection eXp exemplify this creative risk taking and showcase what I have found to be possible. I hope in time these books will inspire poets to push their own boundaries just as cummings et al inspire me to push my own.

Steve Wheeler

Photo (c) Wheelsong Books Ltd

SPECIAL OFFER: If you purchase a copy of Creative Deviance directly from Wheelsong Books: wheelsong6@gmail.com you will also receive a copy of eXp absolutely free. 

Experimental Poetry 15: Quantum Elements

About 20 years ago, the artist and poet Valerie Laws created an installation called Quantum Sheep. A 'quantum' is an allowed or required amount. Laws painted words onto the backs of sheep and then watched as the flock naturally moved across the field grazing. As the sheep moved around, new poems were constantly created. You might say they were Haik-Ewes.

In reality, perfect poetry was rarely observed, but as you can see in the above image the experiment demonstrated how random movements of words could create primitive sentences and breaks in lines, and generate idiosyncratic meaning for all those who observed. Poetry is like that. It really doesn't matter too much what the author intended. The reader or observer will impute their own meaning from the text regardless. 

Now, I am not encouraging you to go out into a field with a spray can and vandalize a flock of sheep. But there are other parallel methods you can try.

Method 26: Quantum elements. You will need a little preparation for this. Create a list of 66 words, a mix of verbs (drift, fall, rise, breathe, etc), nouns (clouds, ocean, jewell, sun, etc), prepositions (over, under, through, around, below, etc), adjectives (beautiful, evil, strange, wise, etc), adverbs (loudly, slowly, tired, lonely, etc), connectives (but, and, also, with, because, etc) and definite articles (make sure you have plenty of these: 'the' and 'a' or 'an'). Assign each word a number. Now grab a couple of dice and throw them. If a one and a six come up, you have the option to use word number 16 or word number 7 (1+6), or indeed word number 61. Write each word down. Repeat the process until you have a semblance of a poem. 

If you use three dice, you have a choice of 666 words (oh no, the mark of the beast!), and if you use 4 dice the choice will of course be 6666, and so on... the more dice you use, the more madness you will generate!

Method 27: Random word search. Use the same two or three dice and select a random book from off the shelf. Throw the dice to find a page number in the book. Turn to it. The second throw (with two dice) will indicate the line number. The final throw (with two dice) will tell you the word in the line. Capture each word onto paper and watch as it builds a confection of words. With some rearrangement, you should be able to create a unique poem. 

Method 28: Quantum words. Use a similar word list, either using cut outs from a magazine or newspaper, or from your own list of written words. Put them all into a box or container, and then draw them out, one at a time - without looking. Rearrange them onto a surface and see what emerges. Potentially a more successful way of doing this is to have separate boxes for nouns, verbs, connectives etc. and draw one from each as you construct your avant garde poem.

The random variability of these methods and the vast store of words should provide you with endless possibilities to create unique poetry, and with a little massaging of the sequences, possibly even some beautiful, evocative lines. 

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
Experimental Poetry 9: Anarchic Poetry
Experimental Poetry 10: Timed Writing
Experimental Poetry 11: Paraphrasing
Experimental Poetry 12: Deliberate Malapropism
Experimental Poetry 13: Breaking Structure
Experimental Poetry 14: Speak out Loud

Image from Valerie Laws Website