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


Required Book
Penn Books center will have these. Support our local bookstore!
Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style
Peter Gizzi, In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011
James Sherry, Entangled Bank (buy directly from press or Penn Book Center or Amazon)

Introduction

The first thing to do is subscribe to the course Discussion list (via Google groups): wreading.
•email to list: re-wreading -- @ -- sas.upenn.edu

Writing Experiments


1. (Sept. 11) Introduction / Substitution
This is an introductory assignment to be done before the first class and submitted by the weekend before our first meeting: DUE Sunday Sept 10, after your sub to the list..
Reading: Lee Ann Brown, "Pledge," Michael Magee, "Pledge" from Morning Constitutional (go to p.37 of pdf of book)
Kenneth Goldsmith, "Head Citations" (see also Marmoset)
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. 

[Sunday, 9/17 at KHW: POETRY & MUSIC FESTIVAL 1:30 PM: Jake Marmer and Frank London 2:15 PM: Julie Patton and Paul Van Curen 3:00 PM: Bob Holman and Papa Susso]

2. (Sept. 18) 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. We can take advantage of the long break before second class to do this.
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? Also provide a short commentary of the Queneau reading: a notebook-like response to reading the work. What is your sense of the meaning/difference of variations? How does it related to translations?

§
 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 and the reading & respond to the work of at least one other member of the class****

3. (Sept. 25) 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: Jonathan's Stalling's Yinglishi
and Yunte Huang's SHI.
provide a commentary on your work; try several of these done on different days. provide a commentary on the set of readings:
§ 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 Translate 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. See also Translation Party and Bad Translator.
§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
§
Bird song homophonics: Listen to a birdsong and transcribe what you hear in English words or alphaetic transcriptions. Large library of birdsongs here; additional auido here. For example, "chimp chimp" for the winter wren. See John Bevins, aaaaw to zzzzd: The Word of Birds (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T Press, 2010).
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

•••provide a commentary on your work & respond to the work of at least one other member of the class****

[Thursday, 9/28 TECHNICIANS OF THE SACRED: 50TH ANNIVERSARY, KWH, 6:00 PM with Jerome Rothenberg, Ariel Resnikoff, et al]


4. (Oct. 2)

Peter Gizzi class visit and reading
WE MEET AT KELLY WRITERS HOUSE AT 6:30pm
Note we start 1/2 hour late and class will end 9:20. We will stay on in the Arts Cafe to meet with Gizzi after his reading and reception.

Reading: assinged book: In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011

§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.) See Wave Books erasure pages. See Deletionist app.
For this week: try the erasure on one of Gizzi's poems
§ Translate a Gizzi poem into the non-English language you know best.
§ Write a poem in imitation of one of Gizzi's. You can pick up on theme, moode, form, rewrite from your own point of view, or try one of the homolinguistic translation or substitution excercises of week one.
•••provide a commentary on your work and also on Gizzi's book***

5. (Oct. 9) 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
Further/optional reading: Burroughs/Gysin
"Minutes to Go"
pdf of full Third Mind; more Burroughs; The Ticket That Exploded
provide a commentary on your work and on the reading
do a few:
§ Acrostic chance:  Pick a book 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."
Cf: site tha offer true ranomization: random.org
§ 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 & the reading and respond to the work of at least one other member of the class****

6. (Oct. 16) 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
provide a commentary on your work and on the reading
§
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 & the reading and respond to the work of at least one other member of the class****

[Tuesday, 10/17 HERMAN BEAVERS AND WILLIAM J. HARRIS, KHW, 6:00PM]

7. (Oct. 23) James Sherry Visit and reading
WE MEET AT KELLY WRITERS HOUSE AT 6:00pm. We will continue with Sherry as a class visitor after the reading and recepton in room 202 of KWH, upstairs.
James Sherry, Entangled Bank (buy directly from press or Penn Book Center or Amazon
James Sherry EPC page (alternately, read through his work on this page).
Flarf / Conceptual Poetry / Web-Generated Poems / Found Poems / Appropriation
K. Silem Mohammad, Deer Head Nation. In Deer Head Nation, Mohammad uses the Google search page result as his basic text, editing from there: "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."
FLARF: A recent extension of this approach, which is developing independently, is called "flarf." Michael Magree explains, in this Experiments List exclusive report, "The Flarf Files." See also: a negative view of Flarf & Jacket's Flarf fearture
see also: Claudius App splash sheet
§ Google Poem: construct a poem using Leevi Lehto's engine (use the patterns feature).].
§ Try also: The Apostrophe Engine, the source for Apostrophe: The Book by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry.
§ 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.
§ Cento: Write a collage made up of full-lines of selected source poems. (Or see Kate Fagin's short form centos.)
§ "Pits": Write the worst possible poem you can imagine
§ Use the "Meaning Eater" engine to deform the text of a poem.
§ Data Mining (variation of some of the above): see eg Karri Kokko's Shadow Finlandia: An Extract ( tr. Lehto): a collage of depressive or otherwise dark or gloomy fragments in Finnish blogs.
***do several of these; provide a commentary on your work and the reading plus a comment on at least one other classmate's post***

Oct. 26 at 6: Clark Coolidge at Kelly Writers House

8. (Oct. 30) Attentions
Assignments these week are more than for the other weeks, but do try everything.
A.
Short lines/Short Poems
Tom Beckett & "Hay(na)Ku"
Extenstions (optional): Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofksy, Robert Grenier's Sentences, Willaim Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff. Ted Greenwald
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.

B.
§
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 conv
ersation
§Talk poem: record yourself talking a poem and transcribe. (See David Antin.)

9. (Nov. 6) Memory, Novel Forms
do as many of these as possible, minimum 5 or 6 forms.
§
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. (Or: apologies.)
§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 & the reading, plus comment on a classmate's post***

[Wednesday, 11/8 ERICA BAUM IN CONVERSATION WITH AL FILREIS, KWH, 6:00 PM]

10. (Nov. 13) Digital & Visual Poetry
over the break: review the work of each of your classmates and post your one, two, or three favorite pieces. this will be used for each of you to make a final pdf pamphlet of your work.
A selection of digital and visual poems from
Visual/Concrete anthology
Digital anthology (see reading list too) (start with Stefan's "Dreamlife," nichols, Chang's Dakota. Steve McLaughlin, Loss Pequento Glazier ("Cog" et al), & Jim Carpenter, Issue One)
http://www.yhchang.com/LA_LUCHA_CONTINUA.html
http://www.yhchang.com/
§
Pick several images from the internet or a magazine and make an arrangement with them; then use as a backdrop for a poem or text or juxtapose with the image and poem.
§ 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.
§ Take a poem, first another's then your own, and rearrange the line breaks or visual composition, while keeping the same word order. Do this five times, some with freely composed arrangements and some using some form of counting.
§ 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.
§ Try a "digital" poem, or poem in programmable media, or indeed one using links or HTML as a fundamental dimension, please go ahead with that -- either for this week or next week.. For those without the technical skills to do this, or the software, you might try to do a blueprint or sketch of such a digital work, either entirely new or, perhaps, a hypertext version (or setting) of a poem you have
already written.
***provide a commentary on your work
& the reading plus comment on a classmate's post***

provide a commentary on your work; repeart the experiment at least three separate times over the week

11 (Nov. 20) The Art of Constraint
Jabberwocky & variations
Christian Bök, Eunoia: Coach House e-edition; recommended: Bök's PennSound reading & " e" chapter in flash from UBU.
Extensions (optional): Kenneth Goldsmith, “Fidget”
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.***

12. (Nov. 27) Davy Knittle will teach the class in my absence
Reading: Davy Knittle, Get On Like Houses. PDF
Prepare two questions for Knittle; he will respond at beginning of the class.
**as always: comment on reading and writing assigments!**
From Davy:
The following two-part assignment will accompany your reading of the manuscript get on like houses. Both parts of the assignment include options. For each category, choose the option that is most interesting to you and/or the one you think you’ll be most able to accomplish:
At the beginning of class, we’ll chat about your assignments, reflections and the two questions Charles has asked you to write, and figure out collectively how we’d like to talk about the book. (This is to say that you can ask me anything. We’ll use the poems to help facilitate whatever conversation seems most urgent.) We’ll also perform a series of writing exercises with, through and against the poems.
(W)reading Assignments
(brief option) – as you read the poems, make a list of all of the different registers of language that you notice (i.e. – academic discourse, advertising language, familial language, etc.). do you recognize references or tone in the poems? how would you characterize the language you encounter? for registers that you cannot easily categorize, make up a category. you’ll use your list of registers in your writing exercise.
(moderate option) – as you read, pay particular attention to the nouns in the manuscript. highlight or underline all of them. when you finish, go back through and make a list of the twenty nouns that are most interesting to you and the twenty nouns that are least exciting to you. you’ll use your lists in your writing exercise.
(extensive option) – as you read, make a note of all of the different formal concerns in the manuscript. how many lines are in each stanza? is the text left justified? how does the syntax work? is it consistent across poems? does it relate to the subject matter? do these poems have one speaker or many? write a brief (one paragraph) description that articulates the formal preoccupations of the manuscript). you’ll use your description in your writing exercise.

Writing Assignments
(brief option) – go back to an assignment that you’ve written earlier this semester for ENGL 111 and turn it into a poem that might be in this book. use at least ten words from the list or paragraph you generated during your (w)reading. with your poem, include a short paragraph explaining what you did and why the poem is suited to hang out with the others in the manuscript.
(moderate option) – write a cento (a poem assembled from fragments of existing text) using one or several poems in this manuscript and one or two texts you read earlier this semester that you think might be in dialogue with this one. if you’d like, you might also use assigned text from another course (articles, textbooks, slides and book chapters are all fair game). include a list of your source texts and a brief reflection on the process with your submitted assignment.
(extensive option) – for the six days before class (so, Tuesday-Sunday) keep a record of the objects you encounter and any overheard speech that is exciting to you. think about the objects in your daily life that are most specific to you or most indicative of your daily procedures, habits and concerns. on Sunday, write a draft of a poem that uses as many of those objects/phrases as are useful to the poem. submit the poem with a short description of your collecting process, including anything that stood out to you. bring both the poem and the list to class on Monday.

13. (Dec. 4) Ekphrasis (translating the visual into the verbal)
Assignment: go to Barnes Foundation Museum or Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts (note PMA has free days and for Barnes you need a reservation).
Write a poem or several poems to accompany a painting or scupture. Take a picture of the work (or find on-line) and post with the image. Along with the poem, provide a full visual description of the work: everything you see, everything you noitce.
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.
•••provide a commentary on your work:
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 in 2015, 2014, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009
ersation. (See Kenneith Goldsmith's Soliloquy.)
•••provide commentary on your work plus comment on a classmate's post***

Dec. 5: M. NourbeSe Philip and Kyoo Lee at KWH at 6.

14. (Dec. 11) (Last Class)
Performance / Class Anthology / Chapbooks / Web site : Last Class
Make a chapbook or some other phyical object to give to everyone in the class. Also, make a pdf pamplet of your work to link to class 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)