Author: Claudia Tung

Cutting Up to Building Up – Claudia Tung

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The case that I chose is called “Writing with Scissors”, and the object on display is William Burroughs’s cut ups in a folder from circa 1960s. There are lots of different sizes of squares and rectangles of paper with words from many passages of texts. This case first drew me to it because it just looked strange and interesting because I wondered why someone would cut up passages and what they were planning to do with the squares.

Although this case talks about a technique called the cut-up writing technique, it reminded me of the works by Ted Berrigan and Medbh McGuckian. During one of our MARBL visits, we saw Ted Berrigan’s process of scratching out words from a book to create an entirely new work. During class, we also saw how Medbh McGuckian would choose bits and pieces from other poems/works to forge her own poem. Both of Berrigan’s and McGuckian’s work “borrow” words/phrases from other work, just like what Burroughs was doing with the cut-ups. These are all examples of intertextuality, which I think is a very creative and innovative way to create your own piece of work. This installation gives me ideas on how I might structure my own virtual exhibit because the Beats Exhibit allowed me to see how bits and pieces of artwork are insights to the artists’, poets’ or writers’ character and thoughts, and that they create these kinds of work for a reason. The exhibit gave me an idea on what types of materials I should be looking at for my poet to really get to know her and put together a meaningful virtual exhibit.

Some questions that came up after looking at this installation at the Beats Exhibit were: how did Burroughs choose which passages to cut from? How did he put the cut ups together? Did all the phrases on the square have to match with the other phrases from another square or did he only do one line at a time? I would love to read a collection of Burroughs’s work along with where and how he got his sources. I want to discover how he approached this intertextuality technique and what kind of new texts he liked to create. Through these examples of his work, I can look into this train of thought as he puts together the cut-up passages. I would most likely have to look at scholarly books if I want to also read about the sources of the texts. I am also aware that there were past exhibits in museums, such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, that showcased Burroughs’s work. I would love to attend one of these exhibits to learn more about Burroughs’s creativity and ideas because it really is a unique approach to writing.

Breaking the English Language Conventions — Claudia Tung

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“Self-Portrait, New City Replicant” by Ching-In Chen (Nov. 1 Poem-a-Day) is like a piece of work where Marlene NourbeSe Philip and Gertrude Stein collaborated on. It follows unconventional grammar and syntax structure that makes it difficult for readers to interpret the poem without deeper analysis, much like the poems by Philip and Stein. More specifically, Chen’s poem reminds me of the poems in Zong! by Marlene NourbeSe Philip visually. The structures of the poem are similar because both poems utilise enjambment and don’t follow a specific meter, and there are no coherent sentences in either works. Both poems have words scattered around the page with large spaces in between the words, and they don’t link up to create proper sentences. However, there are some differences between the poems. For example, the poem by Ching-In Chen is slightly more cohesive because there are phrases scattered around the page, while the poems in Zong! can have words, letters, or phrases scattered around the page, which looks messier and even more disconnected.

                                  

“Self-Portrait, New City Replicant” also reminds me of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons because of the way the poet writes the phrases. Although some of them make sense, there are a few that are rather unorthodox. For example, “adjust the replica body”, drinks the page” and “in the yesterday travel rain” sound like phrases that Stein would write because of the way the phrases are formed. They don’t follow the normal sentence structures and they don’t make sense as a phrase. In addition, Chen writes about different and unrelated things throughout the poem, like Stein does. For example, he talks about heating a sister in the beginning, being comfortable to eat in the middle and an unseasoned tree at the end. None of these sentences go together, like the poems in Tender Buttons. Just to show a comparison, Stein would write things like “boom in boom in, butter”, “wood a supply” and “it is a need that state butter” to describe butter.

Poems like these have always made me wonder what poetry is defined as. There are always a few questions that come along with these unconventional poems: how do the poets even come up with these kinds of phrases? How are we supposed to make sense of them? Why do they write like that and what are they actually trying to convey? As a student without a real talent in poetry, it makes me think that I could write random sentences and become a successful poet because people can interpret my random sentences their own way and assume that it is what I intended to express through the poem. However, I’m sure that there is a much more complicated and meticulous process that goes on behind the poem, which I would love to learn about through personally interacting with the poet.