[stylist] experimental writing

[John Lee Clark]

Barbara:

The simplest definition of experimental poetry is stuff that doesn't make
sense.

Definition B is that it makes you feel stupid.

But experimental poets are focused on words and the mechanics of language,
playing with parts of it, like they're playing a "challenge" game.  Ii dare
you to write a poem sixteen lines long without once using the letter T.  Or
you write a poem with each line ending with a word and a hyphen because that
word is only the first part of another word, and the second half begins the
next line, like:

We're not like-
Ly to find any so-
Lace in Poe-
Try as we might.

Or you have poets who capitalize letters in the middle of words, like if
you're playing with the idea of the color red, you might capitalize the R in
words like winteRed and hundRed and kindRed.  

Or you use parentheses to give certain words double meaning.  Like
fa(r)ther--and in a line where both words, father and farther, would make
some sort of sense.

Or you mess with grammar.  The title of a recent book, for example, is
"Grace, Fallen from."

But most of it I don't bother with reading at all.  There are just some
people who love it, for both "wrong" reasons, like they get to feel smart
but they're not really, and for obscure intellectual reasons, rebelling
against the nature of conversational language.  Many, many times some
popular poets would play a prank on the experimentalists by writing up a
storm of crap, calling it a name with -ism as its suffix, and true enough
the experimentalists would all get all excited with this new "movement" and
start having conferences and stuff . . . only to discover it was just a
bunch of regular poets writing random crap to mock them.

It is only rarely that something really neat comes along from the
experimental front.  And many non-experimental poets have fun playing around
a little.  Take my poem "Blind Bind" for an example.  It is full of words
whose second letter is L and it's still a word without that L.  The first
lines, to give you an idea, read:

Why is my bladder growing
Badder? Banks
Love to give me blanks.

I do not wish to bend
To blend in, yet I try not to
Clash with cash.


I hope this is helpful.  If not, Ii can look for some wildly experimental
work and paste it here.

John










-----Original Message-----
From: stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Barbara Hammel
Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2009 9:02 PM
To: stylist
Subject: [stylist] experimental writing

I was listening to newsline to the poet and writing or whatever that
magazine is there and it mentioned that slice magazine doesn't accept
experimental writing.  I was just wondering what that is.  I've never heard
the term before.
Barbara

If wisdom's ways you wisely seek, five things observe with care:  of whom
you speak, to whom you speak, and how and when and where.
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