Prifysgol Y Treiglo - The Peripatetic University

Welcome to the online collaborative wikisite of The Peripatetic University - Prifysgol Y Treiglo. A repositary of online workshop tutorials. We invite multidisciplinary collaboration, writing experiments and teaching between poets, text artists and interested others.

The Peripatetic University/ Prifysgol Y Treiglo is a nomadic college of experimental writing and Summer school seminar series. We offer mobile seminars, walking conferences and travelling workshops. With an interest in walking poetry, psychogeography, processual poetics and cut-up procedures, lessons take place on the hoof, our campus is in cafes, pubs, markets, shopping arcades, public lavatories, train station foyers. If you know where to find it, the university will be there.

• psychogeography
  • dérive
• walking poetry
• Audio walks
• Cut-ups:
  • Tzara
  • Burroughs
• Markov Chains and Random Walks
• Rhythm & Verse
• Dictionary of forms
• White City Automatic: processual remixology

Cut-ups and Constraints: Applied Poetry

Rhys Trimble

Assignment 5

Jackson Mac Low was a poet that spanned the chasm or cracks between poetry and visual art, visual poetry and wordart, poetry and performance and poetry and music. Associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/New York School poets his methodologies are useful in order to break out of conventional conceptions of literature and the literary ego as do other constraint based poetry studied on this course “The Role of the Machine in the Experiment of Egoless Poetry.” MacLow can give us a little in on another embodied method of collecting which points us towards the derive and psychogeography – the basis for another course perhaps.

Diastic The writer reads through the source text and successively finds words or other linguistic units that have the letters of the seed text in positions that correspond to those they occupy in the seed text. The ‘seed text’ may be a word or a theme like in the following in which MacLow uses the name ‘Emily Dickinson’ as the seed text: Elysium is as far as to IMpregnable of Eye- ThIs was in the White of the Year- NegLected son of Genius RuddY as that coeval Apple This being a post internet universe we have a automated version: http://www.eddeaddad.net/eDiastic/ Activity 1: Choose a ‘seed text’ which might also be a thematic selection and drop into the diastic generator with a source text to select from. or Do the same thing manually – use a seed text and use it to search through the source text to select for words or clusters of words. I myself have a book of things that are after I wrote them diastics though I did not realise at the time: I used a book called Anatomy Mnemonics to select text from Virginia Woolf’s Waves. Asymmetires /Gathas1 This is a drawing experiment in which the results by Mac Low were grid-like things like this: What I want to take from Mac Low and elaborate on, is this concept of drawing words from your environment and using them as a basis for a text or poem. This is a technique that I worked on with another poet Steven Hitchins in the South Wales town of Pontypridd in which we take overheard conversation and names found in Pontypridd market as a basis for a text/poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW4i-iWDCJU. 1 Sansrikt for verse. Activity 2: Go for a walk to a place (maybe unfamiliar) use any text that is written on walls, on products on the street and combine with overheard conversation. Once at home you can if you feel its necessary insert another discourse and work that in: say if you go to a market you could work in sections of Das Kapital.

Go as visual as you like –push the aesthetic!

Post your work!

Rhys

As 21st century poets we inherit an array of poetic devices from twentieth-century experimentation. In addition to the traditional toolkit of rhyming, rhythmic and phonological effects, we have a plethora of processual, procedural, conceptual and performative approaches: ways of circumventing conscious intention, defamiliarising expectations and disrupting syntax to form new connections.

In the seminar-workshop held in Llangattwg, we considered the many reasons for using such methods, the different experiences engendered, and what it's like to engage with such work as readers and writers.

We began by looking at the development of the cut-up technique: from Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp’s use of chance in circling words at random in a newspaper or cutting them out and drawing them from a hat; to the developments made by William Burroughs in slicing and folding whole pages to create multi-spacetime narratives.

We then moved on to the broad variety of playful conceptual mechanisms devised by Bernadette Mayer in her list of writing experiments and journal ideas: systematic translations and transformations and the performative frame of durational constraints.

In the second half we considered the use of spatial parameters in the psychogeographical dérives of the Situationist International. The seminar will combine critical discussion and practical activities, culminating in a writing walk around Llangattock.