Strid and Sessile 8

Writing about web page http://www.chrysalisarts.org.uk

Idea #10: The Valley of Desolation

This view of the Valley of Desolation is the end of the proposed art trail.

Rick nailed it when I asked him what kind of poem would suit the purpose here, what form of words would sum it up: 'Look at all this beauty. Please stop fucking it up'.

I think a little sign here would do the trick. And the summary from Rick will provide the perfect basis for the sentiment. Moreso I think than Wordsworth's 'White Doe of Rylestone'...

So: a simple sign. Straight text on wood? With a good deal of inspiration derived from why this area has such a haunting and bracingly gothic name.

David Morley : 20 Jul 2008 17:26 |  Tags: Poetry The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Strid and Sessile 7

Idea #9: A Fallen Purlenta

I have no idea how I am going to 'build' this poem, but I know I can write it as I have a draft already.

I would like to throw a poem into the trees above the heads of the walkers in the woods, a poem that can only be read from below.

I want the poem to be written in a spiral or whorl, and for the letters to go forward and reverse on the purlenta or 'garland' as you move below it.

I suggest printing the poem on to muslin and then hanging it as best we can using natural fastenings - thorns, twigs, etc, then letting it rot in place or be taken by birds. I have a diagram of the poem which I cannot download here.

If you know my poem about Romany patrin, or natural markers, then you will 'get' the concept of this textual artwork!

David Morley : 20 Jul 2008 17:06 |  Tags: Poetry The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Strid and Sessile 6

Idea #8: Ankle-Level Haiku

All the wonderfully half-lit paths through Strid Wood are lined with little plaques next to particular species of trees. If you look at the photograph on the left you will see one, like a Cubist Mushroom, to the middle left peeping through the undergrowth and underworld of the woodland.

These signs are very small; they are at ankle-level; and they bear the names in Latin and English of the tree species.

They are like shy and almost invisible haiku, yet they are prickly with verbal energy in the origins of language and the international language of biology and Linnaean classification - which is of course Latin, the lingua franca of botany and zoology.

Could we create the same simple plaques, maybe about eight to ten of them, and place haiku or small, concise poems on them - in English. I could also have them in English and Latin, like the tree plaques. My friend the poet Peter Davidson would help me with the Latin I hope!

David Morley : 20 Jul 2008 16:54 |  Tags: Poetry The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Strid and Sessile 5

Idea# 7: View of a Landfill

The first thing that struck me when Rick was describing the Landfill Site visible from this point (in the photograph, right) was the manner in which the debris was placed in this yawning quarry. It sounded to me just like a gardener 'double digging' the earth, only a gardener of startling proportions and dubious eco-morals.

The viewpoint near here is a place of rest (there were bootless hikers cooling their heels).

The fact that one also overlooks a massive and active Landfill is an irony that I suspect is not lost on many visitors.

I'd like to place a poem here; and I think the best means for placing would be site it as a 'You Are Here' map of the landscape in text form - in poem form - and make the thing look like a parody of a municipal-style or National Trust guide-sign like the one below.

David Morley : 20 Jul 2008 16:39 |  Tags: Poetry The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Strid and Sessile 4

Idea #6. Linears and Microbes

When I was a young scientist I used to work a great deal with agar gel. One would paint agar on a petri dish, cultivate it with micobes which would grow rapidly on the substrate. One studied the microbial growth through a microscope.

One can purchase agar in quantity as a paint, a kind of food-paint beloved of microbes, lichen and moss everywhere.

Now see the diagram to the right and the photos of the fences as they pass through Strid Wood - see 'Hide and Seek'. Are not those fence panels (and fallen trees) an ideal series of line-placements for three-line poems or for long linear poems that stretch through Strid Wood?

There are two ways forward with these fence panels (and possibly the fallen trees): (1) write the poems directly on to them as "linears" ["linears" are my own invention: they are single-line poems that go on for many metres. Example: I created a 55 metre long one-line poem cast in bronze in the centre of Coventry atop a wall next to a garden sculpture by Kate Whiteford]; and (2) write the poems as "tercets" or three-line poems utilising the three-line structure of the fence panels in Strid Wood.

There are also two ways forward with media: (1) write the poems in a good playful rushing font in non-carbon dark ink and/or (2) write the poems in the "invisible ink" of agar gel applied directly straight on to the wood. The agar-painted letters of the poem would provide an instant and nutritious habitat for the creation of, first, a microbe community indigenous to the woodland which would darken into life thus revealing the poem in black spores; second, a moss community would develop on the microbe community in symbiosis turning the poems green; and third (if we are lucky) a lichen community would engage the moss/mircobe communities and the poems would end up being 'written' in lichen. A poem in lichen is a poem of an idea. Gaia Principled and playful. And increasing species richness since many birds in Strid (especially those long-tailed tits I saw there) use moss and lichen for their nests. The long-tailed tits would "edit" the poems.

David Morley : 20 Jul 2008 16:11 |  Tags: Poetry The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Strid and Sessile 3

Ideas #4 and #5: Hide and Seek

Strid Wood is a sessile oak woodland with a good deal of other species mixed in. It has a grand history to it which I've been reading about in various texts on the history and geography of the Bolton Abbey area.

Placing the poems that arise from this project is the point of these blog entries - testing ideas out on you and getting your feedback. So here is Idea #4 for the Hide (see picture right).

Area A: There are five visible planks on the right side of the hide entrance which are bisected in a third and two-thirds by a tree trunk.

Area B: To the left is the far inside wall of the viewing area.

Written text can be applied using white or black non-carbon paint and strong calligraphy to both these walls, and the poem must perform in three ways. (1) The poem on Area A must playfully adopt and adapt the tree trunk being part of the poem's text; (2) the Poem on Area B must be about viewing and seeing and hearing; and (c) seen as the distance and perspective of this photograph both poems must work with each other to create a new, third poem. Therefore the text on Area B must be larger than that on A to achieve this effect.

Idea #5: This picture to the right is the text outside the Hide (there are some rudimentary animal guide pictures inside the hide).

Could we play with these? Could we even place a poem on the subject of these information boards side by side so that readers gain both a scientific and an artistic interpretation of what it means to be standing here among the largest area of Sessile oak woodland in Yorkshire, native to the cooler, wetter, higher North West of Britain?

These could be 'shape poems' or poems adapted from field guides. There are a number of examples of these creations in my most recent book The Invisible Kings which I cannot reproduce here as text, but I include photographs of a shape poem below.

The poem is called 'Sycamore' and is written in sonnet form before being kinetically reinvented as a sycamore with leaves falling on the page.

David Morley : 20 Jul 2008 15:36 |  Tags: The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Strid and Sessile 2

Ideas #2 and #3: Seeds of an Idea

I have been making various notes on how the Strid Wood poems could be set. We began with the first idea of Bard Boxes and Bad Boxes and I am now testing out a second idea in my back garden on the path leading to my writing studio - The Seeds of an Idea for a Poem.

Now the 'idea' here is to write the poems in edible seed, along the paths of Strid Wood; and to write them beautifully and lightly in various types of seed which will attract different species - and not just birds for that matter.

Night-visiting deer will also enjoy the poems. They will 'read' them with enthusiasm. With a night-spotting scope set in the hide we can film them as they 'read'.

We lay the seed by day, photograph the whole process, then place the resulting pictures of the poems in the visitor centre for Strid Wood and/or in The Hide (photo below).

The poems will obviously get eaten and will turn into new 'potential' or palimpsestic poems as the animals feast, a gradual process. As my neighbour, Phil, has this minute remarked you might get a whole flock of birds descending on the seed and then the birds themselves would spell out the words if captured (on film!) from above.

The immediate problem? Feed animals and they become creatures of habit. They will expect these 'poems' to turn up again. Advantages? Instant results and spectacular effect. Disadvantage? Gone in 24 hours.

The third idea is to plant seeds along the sides of the path patterned into letters of short one-line (linear) poems which will then grow in subsequent seasons.

Now this is rather like planting into the landscape along the lines of Ian Hamilton Finlay's notion of composition and gardening. It would be rather a long term project and if any of the seeds failed then you would end up with rather strange poems, full of holes and lacunae. In fact they could become postmodern almost by default. One bad storm, one frozen night, and the language would be bitten away as the plants died or etiolated.

The poems would therefore have to be specific to this possibility arising.

Back to the Seeds of an Idea experiment to the left - at the moment there are seven birds at work on them: two goldfinches, one blackbird and four spuggies (or fledgling house sparrows). 'The spuggies have fledged' wrote the Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting, and my spuggies are ripping into the letter M with a gusto borne of Midlands nesting sites in dusty attics between back-copies of Which? and What Car?

David Morley : 20 Jul 2008 15:09 |  Tags: Poetry The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Strid and Sessile 1

I am striding through a deciduous artistic woodland of choices just now. I have four different public poetry commissions, three of which are not page-bound but completely open air - which readers of this blog will know I prefer.

One of these open air poetry commissions is coming to the fore over the next six weeks. It is set in a sessile oak woodland called Strid Wood. There are many other species of trees too, each of which will no doubt play some role in creating the wood-speech of these new poems.

The woodland is set in an historically interesting site, near Bolton Abbey. The River Wharfe courses through the woods reaching a narrow gorge called The Strid. On the far side of the woodland is a valley skittered across by a number of famous waterfalls (Roger Deakin has of course swum in them all). The valley is called The Valley of Desolation. Already I'm out of my seat and into my fell boots!

The excellent Chrysalis Arts, based in North Yorkshire, approached me a few weeks back to look at the site and see what I could come up with over the summer. I have lots of material, but one of the key challenges is 'setting' the poems in place within this woodland in such a way that we accord with Gaia principles - no carbon footprint, no disturbance of habitat. This means that I am having to look at the way I write and place these poems carefully. I cannot afford the Andy Goldsworthy approach of taking natural materials and reinventing them as new visuals. I can't really touch a thing! I am going to use my blog over the next few days and weeks to try ideas out, and also gain your views on how to write into the natural world without affecting it in any way - in fact to create art that increases species richness.

One of my tricks from last year was the creation of Bard Boxes - take a bird box; write a poem that fits the species that uses the box; place poem on the box in a subversive way; place the bird box and thus increase species diversity for that species. The fledglings emerge from within the poem as it were.

This one to the left is by one of my students and so is the example below. I have a patent pending on this idea so hands off, eco-capitalists!

However, this is the first idea for setting the poems in Strid Wood. We write the poems on to bird boxes.

We could have two types: the Bard Boxes with more traditional fonts and images from the natural world and/or another patented idea - the Bad Boxes.

Bad Boxes are the urban version of the Bard Boxes. They are birdboxes streaked with graffiti, poem-graffiti written by/for the species.

What, after all, are birds really 'saying' to each other through 'song'? They are saying 'I'm king (usually it's the males) of this patch and you'd better watch your step (or hop), sunshine, or I'll rip your guts out you m*****f****'.

Male robins get so uptight with other males that they kill each other on occasion. Male robins have been given to self-slaughter, murdering the male in the car mirror, not realising they are attacking their own image. Life in the woods is life on the street.

So I imagine graffitied bird boxes with graffiti-poems on them, poems that really describe what is going between those merry songsters, and these might be an imaginative, and even more honest, interpretation and intervention of the natural world and natural selection.

Yet, even Bad Boxes will increase species richness while 'advertising' the poems.

The problem is that they may be placed so high up that they are scarcely visible to visitors to Strid Wood. In that case, the text must be large enough to be viewed without needing binoculars, and the poems must be short and concise and super-resonant.

David Morley : 18 Jul 2008 10:00 |  Tags: Poetry Prose The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Astonishing Poetry Festivals

The political wing of the Warwick Writing Programme broke into Stratford on Avon last week and let loose some poets.

Thanks to a kind invite from Paul Edmondson the Director of Learning at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and new Director of the Stratford Poetry Festival the poets Fiona Sampson, Andy Webb, Anna Lea, James Brookes (pictured left to right) and me gave readings for the poetry festival.

A large and appreciative audience helped the whole thing move along as did a delightful 'high tea' beforehand in the Birthplace offices presided over by Paul and his wonderful team. (I took the Diabetics right and stole the strawberries and distributed them to the audience.) Our reading in The Wolfson Hall had this strawberry field audience in the round (we had persuaded the seats into this new position by arriving early), with a window overlooking the Bard's birth house and gardens (the window we discovered behind a screen).

Part of what the redoubtable Paul Edmondson is achieving with such events is a partnership between some of the universities around Stratford, their creative writing programmes, and the Stratford Poetry Festival itself - 'that Rolls Royce of Poetry Festivals' according to one national newspaper. The festival is 55 years old, a remarkable fact.

Remarkable too were the performances of the four musketeers pictured above - a sensitive and concise set by Fiona Sampson, currently Creativity Fellow at Warwick whose most recent book Common Prayer is wonderful; a driving, edgy performance of new work by Andy Webb; Anna Lea's superb work and natural stage presence had the audience completely attentive; and James Brookes, a new Jedi that shows promise, suddenly found the force and had the audience eating from his hand, especially a group of young American students who watched him with open mouthed awe while making notes on everything he said between his fine poems.

Two days later I shot across Warwickshire to the Ledbury Poetry Festival and the amazing hospitality of one of its Trust Members, Peter Carter. He and his wife Diana live in a wonderful house just outside the town and my wife and I had the pleasure of lunch with them, along with Pamela Robertson-Pearce, Neil Astley, the poet Samuel Menashe, and my pal and co-reader Marina Warner. Pamela and Neil have just published the poetry/film book and DVD 30 Poets which I'd seen the previous week, a very interesting and relevant project. Sam Menashe is a legend, a poet of intense concision. Marina and I proceeded to Burgage Hall to perform a event on poetry and myth. We had a ball.

I have to say I think the Ledbury Poetry Festival is astonishing in its professionalism, interest and diversity; the programming is skilful and highly adventurous; but what struck me while reading there was the sheer quality of the audience. I have seldom come across a poetry audience with such attentiveness, warmth and intelligence (their questions were precise and superbly informed).

Ah, you will say, you are only kissing the hand that feeds you - but that is not the case. I actually felt lifted by the Ledbury audience in a way I have never quite experienced anywhere else. I am trying to put my finger on it, and can only conclude that I was in the same room (the same converted chapel in fact) as eighty-odd other poets. It was almost as though the audience was not an audience at all. They possessed such vocation. Or maybe it was because it was a chapel. Maybe it is all down to common prayer.

David Morley : 16 Jul 2008 20:18 |  Tags: Poetry The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Erica Wagner on The Warwick Prize for Writing

The Times, July 11 2008

David Morley : 14 Jul 2008 09:52 |  Tags: Poetry The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Warwick Prize for Writing

Writing about web page http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/prizeforwriting/

How does writing evolve? Where is its moving edge? Is all writing – at its very best – a type of creative writing?

To explore these questions – and to identify excellence and innovation in new writing - the University is launching The Warwick Prize for Writing. This prize itself will help define where writing might be going; what new shapes and forms it may take; and even through what media it might be conducted - including electronic forms as well as the traditional form of a book. The value of the prize is a measure of the seriousness of our endeavour: £50,000.

This will be a very distinctive and high-profile project. The prize is unveiled to the world todayand the winner announced in February 2009. It is an international cross-disciplinary award which will be given biennially for an excellent and substantial piece of writing in the English language, in any genre or form, on a theme which will change with every award. The theme of The Warwick Prize for Writing in 2009 is Complexity.

I am tremendously excited about the Warwick Prize for Writing. It will underline the University’s position at the forefront of academic excellence. It also brilliantly reflects Warwick’s thematic approach to learning and reputation for literary and creative excellence. In keeping with the remit of the university, the prize aims to encourage a diverse and international range of entries. Submissions may be translations of a work first published in another language.

Who makes the nominations for this prize? As the Romani saying goes, ‘We are all one – all who are with us are ourselves’. To that end, we are writing to all members of University Staff and inviting them to make a nomination. We want everybody to be involved – nursery staff, cleaners, gardeners, professors and porters. Honorary professors and honorary graduates will also be asked to make nominations.

The winning submission will represent an intellectual, scientific and/or imaginative advance and be written with an energy and clarity that makes it accessible and attractive to a wide audience. In addition to the £50,000 monetary prize, the winning author will be awarded the opportunity to take up a short placement at the University, possibly within The Institute of Advanced Study or The Warwick Writing Programme, or a department of the writer’s choosing.

Let us look briefly at this year’s theme: Complexity. A particularly talismanic statement was once made by Christopher Zeeman, the founder of Warwick’s Mathematics Department and Mathematics Research Centre in 1964: ‘Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity’. Nominators for The Warwick Prize for Writing take note! The theatre writer Kenneth Tynan joked, ‘The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic’. Complexity can be felt as a stone in the shoe of good writing, yet complexity might be part of the writer’s long and sometimes stony journey to simplicity. As the physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes said, ‘I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity’. The virtues of a complex book of poems or fiction might be in the apparent simplicity of its language, and in the subliminal patterning and codes that arc across such work. Art conceals art. The virtue of an accessible and exciting book of creative non-fiction about Fermat’s last theorem might reside in its style. In this latter case, art releases and refreshes knowledge: the art of style translates complex ideas with energy, simplicity and clarity. Yet these are hard-won qualities in writing. In fact they are highly complex processes.

To return to those questions that opened this blog. These are questions I ask myself all the time as a poet and as professor of creative writing at Warwick. When I was a young research scientist I found myself facing the same issues because I often reached a zone where the current knowledge simply tapered to nothing. When scientists reach this point, this moving edge of knowledge, they surf forwards by a combination of previous knowledge, guesswork, and intuition. They become poets; they write – and they imagine - themselves into presence. They create possibility. I always regarded science at this level as a form of creative writing. The physicist Niels Bohr observed, ‘When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images’. The best writing creates possibility.

My point is that, as with a poem or a paradigm, knowledge formation has a moving edge, a place where ‘not knowing’ is almost as important as knowing. If we accept that writing makes you think, and that the formation of knowledge depends partly on the complex and often playful process of writing, then what role does the process of writing play on that moving edge of knowledge? I imagine that the winners of The Warwick Prize for Writing will be situated on that very edge of ‘not knowing’ and knowing: a place of creativity, energy and adventure.

This has been a very exciting (and complex!) project to manage, and I wish to thank all those people who have kindly given their time to help make the project fall into place, and to the Vice-Chancellor for having the vision to make it happen.

David Morley : 10 Jul 2008 10:00 |  Tags: Poetry Prose The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Land Where The OuLiPo Live

Sometimes, the challenge to creative writing is not to make something final or assessable, but to make something potential, a kind of audition with language, or even a playful confection of words and letters—art for art’s sake; play for play’s sake. On the continent of writing, no citizens have as much fun as in the country where the OuLiPo live.

100,000,000,000,000 Poems consists of a sequence of ten 14-line sonnets by the French writer and former Surrealist Raymond Queneau (Editions Gallimard, 1961). Each sonnet has an identical rhyme scheme. In the original edition, the sonnets are printed on the recto side of each page, and the lines cut into fourteen strips. If a reader lifts one strip of line on any of the pages, except the last, a completely new sonnet is revealed. If they lift two strips, then another, and so on in all possible permutations until one reaches 10¹⁴ sonnet combinations, or one hundred million million sonnets, thus the title. The author calculated that someone reading the book 24 hours a day would require 190, 258, 751 years to complete it. They would also need to keep a careful note of the combinations along the way, and obviously be enthusiastic about the book. Queneau’s poem gave birth to an idea.

As war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means, so The OuLiPo is the continuation by other means of literature. Writers, mathematicians and academics founded the OuLiPo or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature) in 1960. Subsequent membership is by election, but that need not stop you from trying out their techniques, or inventing some of your own.

Their purpose was to find out how abstract restrictions combine with imaginative writing. They advocated the use of severe, self-imposed limitations during the act of creation. As Queneau put it, they are as ‘rats who construct the labyrinth from which they propose to escape’. Two of its most famous members are Italo Calvino and Georges Perec (who wrote an entire novel without using the letter “e”). Still formidably active, the OuLiPo is now recognized as one of the most original, productive and provocative literary enterprises to appear in the past century.

They spawned related groups such as The OuLiPopo (potential detective fiction) with their array of methods for inventing and solving crimes; The Oupeinpo (potential painting); and The Oubapo (potential comic strips) devoted to finding new ways to combine drawing with text. All these groups have their rites: annual dinners, outrageous minutes of meetings, bizarre rules and manifestos and mind-bending techniques. However, their purposes are generous, despite closed membership. They seek to expand the variety of what literature might do, rather than dictate what it cannot do or should do. They are a positive, enlivening presence in the discipline of creative writing and students and new writers are urged towards The OuLiPo Compendium (Atlas, 1998) edited by Harry Matthews and Alastair Brotchie.

One of the best places for new fiction writers to start is Queneau’s tale Exercises in Style (Gallimard, 1947). On a crowded bus at midday, the author observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately. When a seat is vacated, the first man appropriates it. Later, in another part of town, the author sees the man being advised by a friend to sew another button on his coat. That is all there is to it. Except that Queneau retells this unexceptional tale ninety-nine times, employing the sonnet and the Alexandrine, “Ze Ffrench” and “Cockney”. An “Abusive” chapter heartily deplores the events; “Opera English” lends them grandeur. It is a tour de force in stylistic demonstration, and teaches even as it pleases.

The playfulness of OuLiPo behaviour and ideas can be liberating, especially in a generative fiction or poetry workshop. There is nothing especially new about the practice of ‘restriction being liberation’. Certainly, in ancient poetry, as in mathematics, the art of numbers was the art of everything. It is a re-formalisation of a practice whose roots lie in rhetorical and compositional challenges that medieval teachers set for themselves and for their students, as we saw in Chapter One. It echoes the tight technical work of the troubadours, as well as the games with form played by

One of the more straightforward exercises for you to try (to gain an idea of what OuLiPo can offer you) is ‘N + 7’ or ‘NOUN + 7’. Take a pre-existing creative work, or one of your own. Read through the piece (it can be fiction, creative nonfiction or poetry) and note the position of all the nouns. Look up these nouns in a dictionary one by one, and then count forwards in the dictionary by seven nouns (not seven words) for every one. For example, taking the first stanza of John Keats famous Ode (NE2: 872):

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!

  Close bosom friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

  For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Using a school dictionary, I counted forward seven nouns from the word ‘season’ and reached the word ‘sea-wall’. Every single noun is swapped by the serendipitous new word; a quite different ‘potential poem’ develops:

To Aviation

Sea-wall of mistresses and mellow fruitfulness!

Close bother fringe of the maturing Sunday-School;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With frustration the vintners that round the theatres run;

To bend with appointments the moss’d cotton trench,

And fill all frustration with ripeness to the cork;

To swell the governess, and plump the headache shelters

   With a sweet ketchup; to set budding more,

And still more, later fluids for the beggars,

Until they think warm deaconesses will never cease,

  For Summons has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cellulite.

The point is not to produce a new and great work of literature, nor is the purpose to subject existing work to ridicule. The point is to play, and to yield fresh ideas and connections. The approach is clever and charming, but it is not an ideology as some followers think; it is the opposite. The OuLiPo create thought-experiments out of a scrabble of letters and language. Nothing might come of it, but the potential is there, as in scientific and thought-experiment. One might do worse, for example, than write a poem that takes as its starting point ‘headache shelters’; or to write a short story that unfolds the reasons why the vintners are frustrated and why they might be running around a theatre; who is bent with appointments; and why the governess is pregnant.

David Morley : 09 Jul 2008 13:16 |  Tags: Poetry Prose The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem