First, News & Recommendations:
Camilla Grudova’s grotesque, darkly funny short story collection The Coiled Serpent keeps popping into my head, since I finished reading it. Specifically the title story, which features a house-share of incel tech bros who are all cursed to graphically explode, one after the other. No idea why that’s on my mind…
I finally caught on to We Are Lady Parts on Channel 4. Love it. Makes me nostalgic for being in a band in my teens.
My friend Annie Dressner has a new song out, ‘For the Thrill of It’, on sexual harassment in the music industry. She’s good, check it out!
I’m teaching courses next term for the Poetry School (Beginners’ Workshop and Poetic Forms for Beginners) and for Morley College (Intermediate Creative Writing). I’m very friendly, book away.
I recently ran a day-long, springtime workshop on making, unmaking, and fragmenting poetry. I thought that I should use more of my PhD, which was on literary fragmentation, in my creative writing teaching. We visited some key modernist collage texts like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All (1923), and Mayakovsky’s How Are Verses Made? (1926) and thought about what collage-influenced writing practices - such as using quotations, and mixing genres and forms, allowing aspects of accident, chaos and chance - could offer writers, one hundred years on.
It was a bit of a challenge to integrate my creative and critical thinking, because my own writing process is not fragmentary, at least in intent. I’m not deliberately disjunctive. I’m always trying to complete, communicate, connect. Only once the poem’s finished do I try to adopt a more scrappy, punk attitude in which it is what it is, take it or leave it. Yet I find fragments, collage texts, and ‘unfinished’ works fascinating, especially the idea that drafting holds bodily emotions that we can then fight the urge to obscure or censor when finishing. The works that writers never published can show you a completely other side to their imaginations (e.g., the teenage works of Jane Austen, in which young women reject social decorum and the marriage plot - a plot that she followed in all her published novels. Or Charlotte Brontë’s Roe Head journal fragments, which are extremely horny, though that’s less surprising to anyone who’s read her closely). In short, I think that the cultural attraction to fragments, from the Romantic period onwards, is connected to inarticulate, bodily experiences, such as laughter, tears, sex, birth, death; and to suppressed histories.
The workshop was hosted by Faber, and it turned out that we were writing at T. S. Eliot’s old desk on the second floor. His desk was huge and could just about fit twelve or thirteen writers squeezed around it. I imagined his ghost peering over my shoulder, elbowing me like a slightly unnerving lizard. We read the first part of The Waste Land, and excerpts from Mayakovsky’s ‘How Are Verses Made?’, in which he wrote that a notebook of preliminaries, noticings, and odd thoughts is essential to writing anything. E.g. he describes drafting a poem as follows:
For two days I pondered words to describe the tenderness a man feels for his only love.
How will he cherish and love her?
On the third night I went to bed with a headache, and hadn’t thought up anything. During the night the formulation came:
Your body
I shall cherish and love
As a soldier
Crippled by war
Useless
Belonging to no one
Cherishes his one leg.I leapt out of bed half-awake. By the dim light of a burnt-down match I wrote on a cigarette packet ‘his one leg’ and went to sleep. In the morning I puzzled for about two hours over that ‘his one leg’ written on my cigarette packet. I wondered how it had got there.1
Mayakovsky still buzzes with a fractious and interrogating energy on the page, as if he’s trying to chat you up; very charming and engaging. His writing also evokes a post-WWI landscape of wounds and deprivation; one-legged people keep reappearing in the essay.
On our lunch breaks we went for walks around the city to gather our own ‘preliminaries’, then experimented with fragmenting our own drafts by letting some chance processes in (e.g.: close your eyes and draw a line rapidly through your page of draft work; now write a new poem, using only the words your line touches).
I ended up with some collage words scavenged from a book of Keats’ poems, such as:
early sobbing
shorn
sweet peas
wretched wight
escape
from his green prison
I was a mad conspirator.
and
scud like a wild bird
sea-foamy cradle
engulfed
eddying
Drunken nipple
crimson mouthed shells
manna grot
And a piece of rough writing with bits of Williams’ ‘Spring and All’ interspersed with my own thoughts:
All along the road the ghosts
wait with dusty wings and feet
unreal but real enough
to trouble us from stupor
sluggish, dazed, insomnia
he can’t sleep. He comes up for air
from the night he’d half-dreamed in
sleep is one way of completing ourselves
daughter says mummy, I’m sad today
two minutes later: I’m happy today
trying things out. Spring’s risky, bipolar
tilting between darkness and light
the pressure to romanticise it
even the newts are getting sexy.
Make it newt!
Sunlight bathes the face like tears
I should call him, he’s alone now.
Which, after drawing a line through it, fragmenting and rearranging, became the following poem:
sluggish wings
can’t trouble ghosts
unreal sleep
can’t trouble ghosts
dazed trying
can’t trouble ghosts
can’t sleep
can’t trouble ghosts
try try
can’t trouble ghosts
daughter I’m
can’t trouble ghosts
sleep sleep
can’t trouble ghosts
trouble trouble
trouble ghosts
It was interesting how this brought some undercurrents of the writing further to the surface. I was thinking about the presence of the past in the present, how we’re again living in a time of fascism, totalitarianism, war (the troubled ghosts). What can writers do now? In some ways, I think it’s in our interests to be very clear, very coherent. Collage techniques are not necessarily progressive and can manifest a kind of nihilistic violence. Ezra Pound used them; so did Marinetti. ChatGPT too could be considered a collage machine, scraping our words and spitting them out in new orders, but its whole purpose is to produce texts that look seamless, to outsource thought.
However, there’s also a long-running association (in Mina Loy’s poems and collages, for example) between collage and writing about poverty; refusing the (false) idea of ‘pure’ cultures by including everything, many languages and points of influence. In a true collage work, defamiliarisation is also the point; the seams should show, it should not be ‘perfected’ because perfection is boring and deadly. Picasso said, of collage:
This displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not made and where it retains, in a measure, its strangeness. And this strangeness was what we wanted to make people think about because we were quite aware that our world was becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring.2
One of the more recent poets we read was Wanda Coleman, who saw language itself as a ‘delicious dilemma’ that shattered and entangled her inside it:
My delicious dilemma is language. How I structure it. How the fiction of history structures me. And as I’ve become more and more shattered, my tongue has become tangled… I am glassed in by language as well as by the barriers of my dark skin and financial embarrassment.3
In her poems Coleman seems to take words and throw them, makes language explode to let her out. In practice, words are endlessly connective; the moment you break them up they start to grow new legs or tails. I’m now attracted to a more ecological view of literary fragmentation, always mulching away, new lives forming and growing and entangling in it like roots. Make it newt.
Vladimir Mayakovsky, How Are Verses Made? (1926), trans. by G. M. Hyde, p. 56 in the PDF accessible here: https://sites.evergreen.edu/se/wp-content/uploads/sites/146/2015/12/Mayakovsky-How-are-verses-Made_-2.pdf
Quoted in Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 77.
‘Wanda in her Own Words’, in Wanda Coleman, Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems (Penguin, 2021; first published 2020), pp. xviii-xxiii (p. xix).
I found this fascinating. Thank you.