Experiments
1.
Homolinguistic translation: Take a poem
(someone else's, then your own) and translate it "English to English"
by substituting word for word, phrase for phrase, line for line, or
"free" translation as response to each phrase or sentence. Or
translate the poem into another literary style or a different diction, for
example into a slang or vernacular. Do several differnt types of homolinguistic
transation of a single source poem. Chaining: try this with a
group, sending the poem on for "translation" from person to another
until you get back to the first author.
2.
He Do the Police in Voices: Dialect
& Idiolect: Translate or compose a poem or other work into a different
dialect or idiolect, your own or other. Dialect can include subculture lingo,
slang, text messaging shothand, etc. For example, Steve McCaffery's translation
of the Communist Manifesto in West Riding of Yorkshire dialect (at PennSound): audio, text. See also
Nathan Kageyam's translation of Pound's "The Return" into pidgin (Hawaiian
Creole English). Use the dialect engine to translate a text into one of several
"dialects," then use the results to make a poem.
3.
Homophonic translation: Take a poem in a foreign
language that you can pronounce but not necessarily understand and translate
the sound of the poem into English (e.g., French "blanc" to blank or
"toute" to toot). Some examples: Louis and Celia Zukofsky's Catullus., David Melnick's Homer at
Eclipse: Men in Aida; Ron Silliman on homophonic translation (his own,
Melnick's, and Chris Tysh's), and some examples by Charles Bernstein -- from Basque, from Portuguese and "Johnny Cake Hollow"
suite. — Rewrite to suit?
see also:
§ bpNichol, Translating Translating
Apollinaire
§ Robert Kelly's Celan
§ "Me Tranform O!"
§ "Nuclear Blanks"
§ Sane as Tugged Vat, Your Love
§Mallarmé, “The Four Salutes”
Cf.Six Fillious by bp nichol, Steve McCaffery, Robert
Fillious, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Dieter Roth, which also included
translation of the poem to French and German. (More info.)
See also these
YouTube clips: Benny Lava , Marmoset,
and Moskau
4.
Lexical translation: Take a poem in a foreign
language that you can pronounce but not necessarily understand and translate it
word for word with the help of a bilingual dictionary. (Rewrite to suit?)
"Language Is a Virus" provides a translation
engine.
6.
Try a variant of these four translation
exercises using the "Babelfish"
and Google Translatateengines or the "Telephone" engine –– or
other web-based translations engines, such as Free Translation.com and Logopoeia's
Shortwave Radio Engine.You can use Google
tr. in telephone fashion: tr. from one lanague to another to another and back
to original language
7.
8.
Do multiple translations of a single
poem, working in groups or indivdually. See Caroline Bergvall's poem setting of mutliple translations of the opening of Dante's Divine
Comedy, from PennSound.
9.
10.
Misheard: Write a poem composed
entirely of misheard song lyrics, clichés, overheard conversations, news
headlines, menu items, etc. See Kenneth Goldsmith, "Head Citations"
11.
12.
Acrostic chance: Pick a book at
random and use title as acrostic key phrase. For each letter of key
phrase go to page number in book that corresponds (a=1, z=26) and copy as first
line of poem from the first word that begins with that letter to end of line or
sentence. Continue through all key letters, leaving stanza breaks to mark
each new key word. (Cf.: Jackson Mac Low's Stanzas
for Iris Lezak.) Variations include using author's name as code for
reading through her or his work, using your own or friend's name, picking
different kinds of books for this process, devising alternative acrostic
procedures. Or use the web Mac Low diastic engine.
13.
14.
Tzara's Hat: Everyone in a group
writes down a word (alternative: phrase, line) and puts it in a hat. Poem
is made according to the order in which it is randomly pulled from hat.
(Solo: pick a series of words or lines from books, newspapers, magazines to put
in the hat.)
15.
16.
Burroughs's fold-in: Take two
different pages from a newspaper or magazine article, or a book, and cut the
pages in half vertically. Paste the mismatched pages together.
(Cf.: William Burroughs’s The Third Mind.) Use the computer Lazarus cut-up engine to perform a similar task automatically; also engines at "Language Is a Virus:" Cut Up Machine, Slice-n-Dice,
Exquisite Cadavulator, & God's Rude Wireless.And: Ron Starr's travesty engine.
17.
General cut-ups: Write a poem
composed entirely of phrases lifted from other sources. Use one source
for a poem and then many; try different types of sources: literary, historical,
magazines, advertisements, manuals, dictionaries, instructions, travelogues,
etc. See cut-up engines listed above..
18.
19.
Cento: Write a
collage made up of full-lines of selected source poems. (Or see Kate Fagin's short form centos.)
20.
21.
Serial sentences: Select one
sentence each from a variety of different books or other sources. Add
sentences of your own composition. Combine into one paragraph, reordering
to produce the most interesting results.
22.
23.
Substitution (1): "Mad
libs." Take a poem (or other source text) and put blanks in place of
three or four words in each line, noting the part of speech under each
blank. Fill in the blanks being sure not to recall the original
context.
24.
25.
Substitution (2): "7 up or
down." Take a poem or other, possibly well‑known, text and substitute another word
for every noun, adjective, adverb, and verb; determine the substitute word by
looking up the index word in the dictionary and going 7 up or down, or one
more, until you get a syntactically suitable replacement. (Cf.: Lee Ann
Brown's "Pledge" & Michael Magee's "Pledge" (go to p.37
of pdf of Morning Constitutional) or Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin, On the Pumice of
Morons; or Bernadette Mayer's "Before Sextet."
N+7 web
engine, Hacking the Academy
26.
27.
Substitution (3): Find and replace.
Systematically replace one word in a source text with another word or string of
words. Perform this operation serially with the same source text,
increasing the number of words in the replace string.
Another approach:Jennifer
Scappatone/H.D "Sea Poppies"/"Vase Poppies
28.
Alphabet poems: make up a poem of
26 words so that each word begins with the next letter of the alphabet.
Write another alphabet poem but scramble the letter order.
29.
30.
Alliteration (assonance): Write a
poem in which all the words in each line begin with the same letter.
31.
32.
Recombination (1): Write a poem and cut
it somewhere in the middle, then recombine with the beginning part following
the ending part.
33.
34.
Recomination (2) -- Doubling:
Starting with one sentence, write a series of paragraphs each doubling the
number of sentences in the previous paragraph and including all the words used
previously. (Cf. Ron Silliman's
Ketjak)
35.
36.
Collaboration: Write poems with
one or more other people, alternating words, lines, or stanzas (chaining or renga),
writing simultaneously and collaging, rewriting, editing, supplementing the
previous version. This can be done in person, via e-mail, or via regular
mail.
37.
38.
Group sonnet: 14 people each
write one ten-word line (or alternate measure) on an index card. Order to
suit. Alternate: write the poem in sequence, with each person writing the
next line having read and considered the previous lines. Modify this to any
form or to an open form with any number of participants.
39.
40.
Collaborative Surrealist Language Event
(I) (for two or more people): One person writes down a question without showing
it to anyone else; simultaneously, another person writes down an answer; poem
is formed by a series of these questions and answers. Alternate form: One
question: multiple answers; vice versa.
41.
. For example: " What is the pink
elephant? The reason why it is so cold this week.// Is the door locked? / I
have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion." (Cf: Robert Desnos's
":Language Events.") (Cf: Robert Desnos's ":Language
Events.")
42.
43.
Collaborative Surrealist Language Event
(II) (for two or more people): One person writes a clause beginning
"if" or "when"; without seeing this, a second person write
a clause in the conditional or future tense. For example: "When
candlelight proves disastrous for performing an appendectomy / Peacocks and
crocodiles would dance on the Nile at noon. // If Homer’s brother is
cannibalized in the forum by the barbarians / A puppy dog would go to lasco.//
If Marx was born in Boise /Then the world would eat nothing but purple-colored
ice cream."
44.
Chinese Whispers (a.k.a
telephone) [version ecriture]: one person writes a line, phrase, sentence,
paragraph, or stanza and passes it on to the next person, who transforms it in
some way and passes it on to the next. Traditionally done orally, as a written
exercise this can be done in a group setting or via email or txt chain. (Cf.:
John Ashbery's "Chinese Whispers.")
45.
This experiment intentionally left
blank.
46.
Modified Equisite Corpse: Each person
in the group writes down one line, folds paper so the line cannot be seen, and
passes to the next.
47.
48.
Write a poem in which you try to
transcribe as accurately as you can your thoughts while you are writing.
Don't edit anything out. Write as fast as you can without planning what you are
going to say. (Sometimes called "free writing. Try this with handwriting.
Compare versions done by hand and on a computer.)
49.
50.
Autopilot: Trying as hard as you can
not to think or consider what you are writing, write as much as you can as fast
you can without any editing or concern for syntax, grammar, narrative, or
logic. Try to keep this going for as long as possible: one hour, two hours,
three hours: don't look back don't look up.
51.
52.
Dream work: Write down your
dreams as the first thing you do every morning for 30 days. Apply
translation and aleatoric processes to this material. Double the length
of each dream. Weave them together into one poem, adding or changing or reordering
material. Negate or reverse all statements ("I went down the hill to
"I went up the hill," "I didn't" to "I
did"). Borrow a friend's dreams and apply these techniques to them.
53.
54.
Write a poem made up entirely of
neologisms or nonsense words or fragments of words. (Cf.: Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky", Khlebnikov's zaum, Schwitters "Ur Sonata."
P. Inman's, Ocker, Platin
and Uneven Devlelpment and David
Melnick's Pcoet. (via Eclipse). Also: "Johnny Cake Hollow"
suite. Use Neil Hennessy's JABBER: The Jabberwocky Engine to generate lexicon. Also see The International Dictionary of Neologisms.
55.
56.
Write a poem with each line filling in
the blanks of "I used to be _____ but now I am ______."
("I used to write poems, but now I just do experiments"; "I used
to make sense, but now I just make poems.")
57.
58.
Write a poem consisting entirely of
things you'd like to say, but never would, to a parent, lover, sibling, child,
teacher, roommate, best friend, mayor, president, corporate CEO, etc.
59.
60.
Take same sentence or stanza and cast
it as if said to oneself silently, half-whispered, said to an intimate, said to
a small group, said to a large group.
61.
62.
Write a poem consisting entirely of
overheard conversation. (See Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy.)
63.
64.
Nonliterary forms: Write a poem in the
form of an index, a table of contents, a resume, an advertisement for an
imaginary or real product (see Nicolàs Guillén [Penn only] & Tan Lin and Paul Violi "Index"
poems, an instruction manual, a travel guide, a quiz or examination, etc. See
Nick Thurston's Historia Abscondita (pdf), an appopriated index work.
65.
Imitation: Write a poem in the
style of each of a dozen poets who you like and dislike. Try to make it
as close to a forgery of an "unknown" poem of the author as possible.
66.
67.
Write a poem without mentioning any
objects.
68.
70.
71.
Backwards: Reverse or alter the line
sequence of a poem of your own or someone else's. Next, reverse the word
order. Rather than reverse, scramble.
72.
73.
Write an autobiographical poem without
using any pronouns.
74.
75.
Attention: Write down everything you
hear for one hour.
76.
77.
Brainard's Memory: Write a poem
all of whose lines start "I remember ..." (Cf.: Joe Brainard's I Remember & audio from PennSound ) . ALSO: Brainard's: Imaginary Still Lifes
78.
79.
"Pits": Write the worst
possible poem you can imagine.
80.
81.
Counting: Write poems that
conform to various numeric patterns for number of words in a line or sentence,
number of lines in a stanza or paragraph, number of stanzas or paragraphs in a
work. Alternately, count letters or syllables. Use complex numeric
series or simpler fixed-number patterns.
82.
83.
Write a poem just when you are on the
verge of falling asleep. Write a line a day as you are falling asleep or
waking up.
84.
85.
[Removed for further study]
86.
87.
List poem 1: Write a poem consisting of
favorite words or phrases collected over a period of time; pick your favorite
words from a particular book.
88.
89.
List poem 2: write a poem consisting
entirely of a list of "things", either homogenous or heterogeneous
(common lists include shopping lists, things to do, lists of flowers or rocks,
lists of colors, inventory lists, lists of events, lists of names, ...).
90.
91.
Chronology: Make up a list of dates
with associated events, real or imagined.
92.
93.
Transcription: Tape a phone or
live conversation between yourself and a friend. Make a poem composed
entirely of transcribed parts.
94.
95.
Canceling: Write a series of lines or
rhymes such that every other one cancels the one before ("I come before
you / to stand behind you").
96.
97.
Erasure: Take a poem of your own or
someone else's and crossout most of the words on each poem, retype what remains
as your poem. (Cf.: Ronald Johnson's RADI OS from Milton.)
98.
99.
Write a series of ten poems going from
one to ten words in each poem. Reorder.
100.
101. Write a poem composed entirely of questions.
102.
103. Write a poem made up entirely of directions.
104.
105. Write a poem consisting only of opening lines (improvise
your own lines, then use source texts).
106.
107. Write a poem consisting only of prepositions, then of
prepositions and one other part of speech, then three part of speech. (Cf:
Clark Coolidge's "Oflenths".
108.
109. Write a series of eight-word lines consisting of one each of
each part of speech.
110.
111. Write a poem consisting of one-word lines; write a poem
consisting of two-word lines; write a poem consisting of three-word
lines.
112.
113. Pick 20 words, either a word list you generate yourself or
from source texts. Write three different poems using only these words.
114.
115. Synchronicity: Write a poem in which all the events occur
simultaneously.
116.
117. Diachronicity: Write a poem in which all the events occur in
different places and at different times.
118. Anagrammatica: Recombine an existing work via anagrams, or
otherwise make a work driven by annagrams. See, for example. K. Silem Mohammad's anagrams of Shakespeare's sonnets.
119.
Visual poetry: write poems with strong
visual or "concrete" elements — including a combination of lexical
and nonlexical (pictorial) elements. Play with alphabets and typography,
placement of words on the page, etc. See Visual Poetry anthology for examples. (See UBUWEB for more examples,)
120.
121.
Write a series of stanzas or poems
while listening to music; change type of music for each stanza or poem.
122.
123. Elimination: Cut out the second half of sentences.
124.
125. Excuses list: Write a poem made up entirely of excuses.
126.
127. Sprung Diary: Write a diary tracking and intercutting
multiple levels of thoughts, experiences, anticipations, expectations, from
minute to major. (Cf.. Hannah Weiner's Clairvoyant
Journal.)
128.
129. "Walking on Colors": Walk a city block or a
country mile paying attention as much as possible to one color; list all the
things found in this one color; write about it.
130.
Improvisation: Ask someone to suggest a
poem title and topic. Write the poem immediately in response. Do this as a
quick series, five minutes maximum for each poem.
131.
132. Negation/Opposites: Negate every phrase or sentence in the
poem or in some way substitute opposite words for selected words in the source
text: "I went to the beach" becomes "I went to the office";
"I got up" becomes "She sat down"; "I will"
become "I will not", etc. As an alternative, take a poem and change
what it says line for line or phrase for phrase; not opposite, just different.
133.
134.
No longer available: Google Poem:
construct a poem using Leevi Lehto's engine (use the patterns feature). See
also (if it comes back on line) Bill Luomo's Lizardo engine. Alternate Google
poem, based on M. Silem Mohammad's Deer Head Nation : use Google search
results as the source material for a poem: erase as much as you like, but don't
add anything. Many variations possible.
135.
See also: The
Apostrophe Engine, the source for Apostrophe: The
Book by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry. [N.B.:Mohammed describes
the compositional method of Deer Head Nation: “You punch a keyword or
keywords or phrase into Google and work directly with the result text that gets
thrown up. I paste the text into Word and just start stripping stuff away until
what’s left is interesting to me, then I start meticulously chipping away at
and fussing with that.”]
136.
FLARF: A recent extension of this
approach, which is developing independent, is called "flarf." Michael
Magree explains, in this Experiments List exclusive report, "The Flarf Files."
137.
Data mining: an extenstion of the
pervious two: make a poem based on variious web searches or other forms of data
mining. For example, Karri Kokko's Shadow Finlandia: An Extract ( tr. Lehto): a collage of depressive or otherwise dark or
gloomy fragments in Finnish blogs.
138.
140.
Multilingual poem: write a poem using
several languages that are integrated into the single poem. (Cf: Anne Tardos).
141.
142. Pick several images from the internet or a magazine and
write an accompanying poem .
143.
144. Graphic design 101.1: Take a poem, first another's then your
own, and set it ten differnet ways, using different fonts and different page
sizes. Make a web version of the poem.
145. Digital poems. See sample at Digital Poetry. Use http://www.spreeder.com/ to construct a kinetic version of a poem.
146. Lineups. From Charles North's invented form based on
baseball lineups, e.g.,Wittgenstein lf, Heidegger 2b, Aristotle 1b, Kant rf,
Hegel cf, Hume ss, Sartre 3b, Plotinus c, Plato p.
147. Take a poem, first another's then your own, and rerrange the
line breaks or visual compostion, while keeping the same word order. Do this
five times, some with freely composed arrangements and some using some form of
counting.
148.
149. From Stacy Doris: I. Write a poem (or take a poem you have
already written on the topic) about sex. Then rewrite it, substituting words
having to do with warfare for the words having to do with sex. II. Write a poem
(or take a poem you have already written on the topic) about love. Then rewrite
it, substituting words having to do with government for the words of amorousness.
III. Write a poem (or take a poem you have already written on the topic) about
god and religion. Then rewrite it, substituting words having to do with a
political figure whose policy you oppose for the words referring to faith and
god.
150.
151. Christian Bök's lipogram Eunoia
consists of a five sections each with words containing the same vowell (as in
"O": Yoko Ono). This is reminiscent of certain notorious Ouilipian
constrains, such as Perec's nover La Disparition , which suppresses the
letter "e". Write a poem in the manner of Eunoia..
152.
153.
Proliferating styles. In 1947, Raymond
Queneau, a founding member of OuLoPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or
"Workshop of Potential Literature") published Excercises de Style,
99 variations on the "same" story. Each of this 99 approaches could
take a place of honor in this list but best to turn to that work for the
enumeration and explanation. For present purposes (if purposes doesn't strike
an overly teleological chord), suffice it to say that an intial incident, mood,
core proposition, description, idea, or indeed, story, might be run through the
present list of experiments, though to what end only the Shadow knows, and
maybe not even the Shadow.
154.
Take phrases from a source text and
embed within a narrative of your own construction. (See Alan Ramón Clinton's use of a Bob
Perelman poem.)
156.
Use any of these experiments that
involve as source text as a way of reading through already existing poems; that
is, as interactive tools for "creative reading." As an extention,
study poems via the modes of "Deformative Criticism" (the term is from Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels). For
example, take a poem and erase all but one part of speech, leaving the visual
layout intact, or read it backward or otherwise re-order it, or translate it
(using any of the translation excercises listed here), Alternately, use these
experiments as a way to rewrite or transform your own poems.
157.
159.
160. Use a sound editor to scramble, resound a sound file of a
poem. (See PennSound Deformance page, under constuction.)
161.
162. Make a poem composed of all the things you don't know (or
some of them)
163.
164. Make up more experiments.
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