111

English 111 / Comp Lit 115
Experimental Writing Seminar: Constraints & Collaborations

Charles Bernstein

Spring 2011
Mondays at 2
CPCW, 3808 Walnut, Rm 111

Required Book at Penn Book Center:
Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style
Caroline Bergvall, Meddle English

Class web:
coursekit (write me for sub code)

Writing Experiments

12 (April 16 ) Attention, Talk, Web site
Caroline Bergvall Class Visit. Reading and discussion.
Reading: Bergvall's Meddle English

Note: 7:30pm Andrew Lampert film showing in FBH, sponsored in part by English 111.

Start to work on your individual web page (or pdf/word) final presentations, with table of contents / title page; we link to this page from the class web site. Post links to the list of your propose title page / table of contents. We also need to do this for the oneoneone web site as well. Would any of you like to volunteer to design the title page and TOC for that?
For example, see web site created by Spring 2011 seminar, Spring 2010 seminar and the Spring 2009 seminar

§Talk poem: record yourself talking a poem and transcribe. (See David Antin.)
§Attention: Write down everything you hear for one hour: it is important to do this for the full time period.
§Write a poem consisting entirely of overheard conversation. (See Kenneith Goldsmith's Soliloquy.)

•••provide a commentary on your work(((((((((

April 18, 2012 – 8:00 P.M.
CAROLINE BERGVALL - Rachel Blau DuPlessis Lecture in Poetics Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222

13. (April 23) Performance / Class Anthology / Chapbooks / Web site : Last Class
Make a chapbook or some other object to give to everyone in the class. Also, finish uploading work for the web site. We will fous on performance. As part of working on your final project, bring in something to perform, up to five minutes (new work or older work, though new work always preferred). We will discuss the performances (to be continued next week).

Extensions/Free Assignment
This is a chance to focus on your own on-going projects, for those of you who are working on a manuscript or performance or project.
Optonal: Use the Experiments list, picking experiments not included in the syllabus, extned one of the assingments from the class so far.

1. (Jan. 23) Introduction / Substitution
This is an introductory assignment to be done before the first class and submitted by the weekend before our first meeting: DUE FRIDAY, Jan. 20.. Note that because the Marting Luther King holiday, our first meeting starts a bit later in the semester. The first half of the seminar will be introductions, but we will do on to the assignment in the second half.
Reading: Lee Ann Brown, "Pledge," Michael Magee, "Pledge" from Morning Constitutional (go to p.37 of pdf of book)
Kenneth Goldsmith, "Head Citations"
Bernadette Mayer, "Before Sextet"
Jennifer Scappatone/H.D "Sea Poppies"/"Vase Poppies"
§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.
§ 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. N+7 web engine.
§ 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.

2. (Jan. 30) Exercises in Style
Reading: Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau
In 1947, Raymond Queneau, a founding member of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or "Workshop of Potential Literature") published Exercises de Style, 99 variations on the "same" story. Each of these 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 initial 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.
Extentions (optional): Caroline Bergvall's poem setting of mutliple translations of the opening of Dante's Divine Comedy, from PennSound.
§ Homolinguistic translation: Take a poem (someone else's or your own) and translate/rewrite/revise it by substituting word for word, phrase for phrase, line for line, or "free" translation as response to each phrase or sentence. Or do several versions of the "same" poem. Or: translate the poem into another, or several other, literary styles.
§ We will also do this as a chain: via the list ... The "translation" will go from person to another until you get back to the first author. As a general rule, each new version must change at least one-third of the words or the equivalent. Do not to hold onto the chain for more than a few hours. After the first person is designated to start, each person will tag another person on the list. This can all be done in the comments field. To be sure the person is aware of this, also email her or him.
§ Recombination (1): Write a poem and cut it somewhere in the middle, then recombine with the beginning part following the ending part.
§ Recombination (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.
Further reading: Queneau's One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
•••provide a commentary on your work: what was the experience of doing the exercise?, what do you like best about the results?, do you like the original or your derivative product "better"? what does "better" mean to you?

3. (Feb. 6) Homophonic & Dialect Translation
Homophonic reading: Louis and Celia Zukofsky's Catullus & two examples of mine: from Basque and from Portuguese.
Dialect reading/listening: Steve McCaffery's translation of the Communist Manifesto into West Riding of Yorkshire dialect: audio, text
Zukofsky,"A Foin Lass" [resricted to Penn only!] [you can find Zukofksy -- and me too -- reading this on the Zukofsky PennSound page).
Here are two more complex translation experiments with Chinese: Robert Majzels et al's 85s & Jonathan's Stalling's Yinglishi
§ 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 (i.e., French "blanc" to blank or "toute" to toot).
§Try a variant of these translation exercises using the "Babelfish" and Google Translatate engines or the "Telephone" engine –– or other web-based translations engines, such as 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
§Translate or compose a poem or other work into a different dialect, your own or other. Dialect can include subculture lingo, slang, text messaging shothand, etc.
§Use the dialect engine
Extenstions (optional):
David Melnick's Homer at Eclipse: Men in Aida -- part one and part two;
Ron Silliman on homophonic translation (his own, Melnick's, and Chris Tysh's)
Nathan Kageyam's translation of Pound's "The Return" into pidgin (Hawaiian Creole English).
§ bpNichol, Translating Translating Apollinaire
§ Robert Kelly's Celan
§ "Me Tranform O!"
§ Sane as Tugged Vat, Your Love.
§Benny Lava (see also Marmoset and Moskau

•••provide a commentary on your work; try several of these done on different days

4. (Feb. 13): Chance Operation & the Aleatoric
Reading: Jackson Mac Low
* "Insects Assassins" from Stanzas for Iris Lezak (string word is the poem title)
*3d Biblical Poem (1955) and brief account here
*Selection from Representative Works, plus "Word en Ends from Ez"
*from Words nd Ends from Ez (string word: Ezra Pound)
*William Burroughs on cut-ups & Brion Gysin on cut-ups; pdf of full Third Mind
do one of each
§ 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. 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.
§ 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.) "Language Is a Virus" has an engine that makes poems from your selected vocabulary list, a cross between "Tzara's Hat" and "Mad Libs."
§ 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 engire 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 (no longer online)
§ 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 just above
•••provide a commentary on your work

5. (Feb.20) Ekphrasis (translating the verbal into visual)
Pictures for the seminar visit
We will meet at the Ross Art Gallery in the Fisher Fine Art library (220 South 34th St., between Walnut and Spruce). Visit the gallery the week before Feb. 21 and write poems in response to or to accompany or exist in conjucntion with the work on view at the gallery (or check upcoming link). The show is "In Material: Fiber 2012."
The Gallery will open especially for us on Monday. But you need to go there first during their regular hours: Tuesday through Friday: 10 AM to 5 PM Saturday & Sunday: 12 PM to 5 PM Closed Mondays and some holidays.
Be sure to bring a hard copy of what you write so you can perform it. You are free to approach this assignment as you like, but let me make this initial suggestion: Write down everything you see in the work, a complete description. This can be in prose. When we meet at the Ross gallery, you will each present your work; this will be a performance situation, where you will find a spot in the gallery to read from; and we will talk about reading in the space and performance in general. It is also possible to involve others from the seminar in the performance. It is also possible to write something for the space rather than a specific work.
Extensions: Write a poem to accompany an image A good source of on-line images is the PennSlide library and ArtStor (via library e-resources). Write a poem to be read in a place.
***the gallery would like to post the poems on their web site for the show; they would also like us to do a "podcase" – so we can talk about that.
•••be sure to post the first "complete descriptions" to the list
•••do two of three poems (on one piece or several)
•••provide a commentary on your work:

6. (Feb. 27) Without Rules, (K)not!, or Is Free Writing Free?
Jack Kerouac on spontaneous bop prosody
Bernadette Mayer, from Studying Hunger
The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters - Excerpt
Hannah Weiner, Clairvoyant Journal: text begins here & read with audio MP3 (26:48): first couple of pages is fine.
______"Ubliminal"
Clark Coolidge, from American Ones
§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. (Try this by handwriting if possible.) For the class: do this three times in the course of one week or do all three experiments listed here.
§ 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.
§ 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.
§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.
•••provide a commentary on your work

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MARCH 5 SPRING BREAK
in process: collaborative "Twitter" poem
Special assignment over this break. Each seminar member will open a Twitter account using their first name or first and last name followed by "111". This will be a closed Twitter group just for class. All the messages will be part of a collaborative poem. Each participant will produce and post a version of this poem before March 13.
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7. (March 12) The Art of Constraint
Jabborwocky & variations
Christian Bök, Eunoia: Coach House e-edition; recommended: Bök's PennSound reading & " e" chapter in flash from UBU.
Extensions (optional): Kenneth Goldsmith, “Fidget” (see also java version)
Christian Bök's lipogram Eunoia consists of a five sections each with words containing the same vowel (as in "O": Yoko Ono). This is reminiscent of certain notorious Ouilipian constrains, such as Perec's novel La Disparition , which suppresses the letter "e" or the work of Queneau (such as Exercises in Style).
§Write a poem in the manner of Eunoia.
§Write a poem made up entirely of neologisms or nonsense words or fragments of words. (Cf.: Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky", Khlebnikov's zaum, Schwitters's "Ur Sonata," P. Inman's, Ocker, Platin and Uneven Devlelpment and David Melnick's Pcoet: all via Eclipse). Use Neil Hennessy's JABBER: The Jabberwocky Engine to generate lexicon. Also see The International Dictionary of Neologisms.
§Write a poem consisting only of prepositions, then of prepositions and one other part of speech; then three parts of speech.
§ Write a series of eight-word lines consisting of one each of each part of speech.
§ Pick 20 words, either a word list you generate yourself or from source texts. Write three different poems using only these words.
§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.
§ Alliteration (assonance): Write a poem in which all the words in each line begin with the same letter.
§ Group sonnet: 14 people each write one ten-word line (or alternate measure) on an index card. Order to suit.
§Write a "sound" poem
•••provide a commentary on your work, do as many as possible; perhaps one each day over the week.

8. (March 19) Memory, Novel Forms
Ron Sillman reading at 6:30pm, KWH Arts Cafe. YOU MUST RSVP for this reading >> jjossely@writing.upenn.edu

Optional Reading Silliman:
Ron Silliman@EPC
PennSound: LINEbreak interview
Tom Marhall DLB/Gale intro; Poetry Fdn bio
"Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World": read; print (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Supp. #3 via Eclipse)
Ketjak: pdf download, web doc (first section of The Age of Huts or buy full book from UC Press or read rest at EPC)
"Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps" (Tuumba, 1978)
*
do as many of these as possible, minimum 5 or 6
§Brainard's Memory: Write a poem all of whose lines start "I remember ..." (Reading: Joe Brainard's I Remember & audio
§Brainard's: Imaginary Still Lifes
§Synchronicity: Write a poem in which all the events occur simultaneously.
§ Diachronicity: Write a poem in which all the events occur in different places and at different times.
§Write an autobiographical poem without using any pronouns.
§Write a poem about a single object. (Reading: Ponge's Object)
§Write a poem made up entirely of excuses.
§Write a poem in the form of a resume.
§Write a poem in the form of a index (cf., Paul Violi).
§Write a poem in the form a table of contents
§Write a poem in the form an advertisement for an imaginary or real product. (See Nicolàs Guillén.)
§Write a poem in the form an instruction manual
§Write a poem in the form a travel guide
§Write a poem in the form a quiz or examination, etc.
§Write a poem in the form of a baseball lineup; cf: Charles North: Wittgenstein lf, Heidegger 2b, Aristotle 1b, Kant rf, Hegel cf, Hume ss, Sartre 3b, Plotinus c, Plato p.
•••provide a commentary on your work

March 28, 7pm: Humanities Forum: I am in dialog with film maker Ken Jacobs, who presents a screening of his films. International House.

9. (March 26) Short lines/Short Poems (Attention I)
Tom Beckett & "Hay(na)Ku"
Extenstions (optional): Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofksy, Robert Grenier's Sentences, Willaim Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff
Aram Saroyan's Aram Saroyan
§ Write a poem consisting of one-word lines; write a poem consisting of two-word lines; write a poem consisting of three-word lines.
§Try out Hay(na)ku or Haiku
§Try some variant short-line form.
•••provide a commentary on your work; repeart the experiment at least three separate times over the week