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

PS thanks to anyone who recognises their title amongst the nonsense above.

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.

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 :-))

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.

Exactly.

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.

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

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.

Hi Ewan,

This is a technique I've used myself, with varying results, over the years. I agree, it usually requires some sort of author intervention to create something comprehensible. 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.

In best Blue Peter tradition, here are some I made earlier:

http://www.abctales.com/story/wilkybarkid/bad-night-charing-cross-sundow...

http://www.abctales.com/story/wilkybarkid/life-mars-0

http://www.abctales.com/story/wilkybarkid/time-out

http://www.abctales.com/story/wilkybarkid/gene-rebels

http://www.abctales.com/story/wilkybarkid/never-say-neverland-again

'Time Out' was formed from snippets from the weekly magazine of the same name. They appear unedited in the same order they were chosen. The word 'chosen' indicates that I was making some kind of editorial decision in their selection.

'Never Say Neverland Again' was a less successful attempt to repeat the experiment a few years later. The snippets remain in order, but contain interventions in the form of small links to make the phrases appear to follow some kind of logic.

'Bad Night At The Charing Cross Sundown' contains unedited snippets from the NME, but re-arranged to form a kind of narrative.

'Life. On Mars' is assembled from various articles about the television series. Again unedited but re-arranged.

'The Gene Rebels' comes from a piece of my own short fiction that I literally chopped up with scissors and re-assembled in the form of a prose poem.

Personally, I would like to see more of this kind of experimentation on ABCtales. I think we spend too much time in our comfort zones and should push the limits a bit more.

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.

'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.

Jim,

why not try it?

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.

I can't speak for other exponents of this method, but I think, as you indicate in your original post, that random methods tend to produce utter gibberish most of the time. It's a question of whether to 'work' the material into something that approaches sense, or to stay true to the original Dadaist notions.

My approach is usually to select the snippets with a bias towards them already fitting some sort of predetermined parameters, then playing around with them until they form some kind of pattern. This has some poetic validity, I suppose, in the intent of creating an illusion of order out of chaos.

But it is a bit like assembling a poem from a kit, albeit one with the instructions missing, so it is more of a craft than an art, perhaps.

The time taken is certainly comparable to writing a poem by more traditional means. The difference is that the source of material and inspiration is all external to the poet's imagination. However, I believe the mechanics of the operation are a useful exercise in understanding how the elements of a poem fit together, particularly if you work in free verse. When does it stop being random phrases and actually become a poem? Does it ever?

Thanks for the retrospective (nearly said posthumous) cherry, by the way. The site seems to have acquired a whole new editorial team recently.

Oh and I've just remembered there is one more in my back catalogue:

http://www.abctales.com/story/wilkybarkid/kiss-kiss

This was made from phrases extracted from a book of SF short stories and took considerable intervention to contrive it having the structure of a 1970's pop song. An homage to the times.

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