I was thinking about verbless poetry recently. I saw Ezra Pound's "In the Station of the Metro" in the newsfeed and then i've heard thunder but there was no visible lightning strike so i was left without a proper closure. I've tried to write a poem without verbs on the fly but ended writing mostly fun-sounding verbs and nothing else. They were simply jumping out of my head. It was unconscious - i wanted to get out of comforting flow into the unknown - i wanted to do something else. And so i was hoarding incresingly bizarre verbs in a revolving coil of ludicrity. And then i thought that after such elaborate vocabulary exercising - it would be quite useful to actually try to write a poem without verbs.
And so i ended up staring at the blank sheet of paper for some time because i didn't really wanted to write a poem without verbs at that particular moment. No matter how hard i've tried to pretend to channel Ezra Pound - i just couldn't get pass through another tasty verb without taking it with me before it vanished in my head.
I guess it is a problem no one cares about - you can't escape from using verbs. At least for prolonged periods of time. Not that it is really matters or something - it is just utterly unneccessary. I mean - it is fun to OULIPO up yours once in a while - but in the end there is even more fun to be processed by casually ignoring self-imposed constraints.
Why bother messing with the verbs? Verbs simply convey actions, occurrences and states of being. As any other words they bring something to the table - they transform the text. You can think them over, interpret, put into the picture or out of it - any way you want. And that reminded something.
Here's a list of verbs titled "Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself". It was written around 1967-68 by an American conceptual artist Richard Serra. It is an instruction manual disguised as an art piece. The list is comprised of verbs in infinitive form. It is a neat compilation of various verbs you can apply to yourself or anything else and turn it into empiric performance piece.
Despite its ambiguousness - all verbs more or less relate to the actions generally applied during an artistic process - such as cutting, mixing, stretching, arranging, covering, expanding, continuing, etcetera. But they are taken out of the context and gathered together seemingly at random. All the verbs in the list describe the processes of giving or changing a form of something. The list mainly deals with such questions as "What are you doing?" and "What you can do?". The whole thing comes from an observations Richard Serra had made while working in his studio. He simply documented what he was doing step by step. He verbalized the way he was dealing with materials and the way he comprehended the very nature of artistic process.
Originally the list was simply a handwritten note - somewhat reminescent of school dictionary expansion exercises. But later it spawned numerous derivative piece such as "Splashing" or "Scraping Hands". It shows the potency of taking out the words out of actions and transforming them back into actions. And that what makes it so powerful.
"Verb List" exceeds its primary purpose. As a list it is bigger than sum of parts it represents. It is a kaleidoscopic snapshot of an artist's mind in the mode of self-reflection. But it is distanced from the artist's point of view to the sheer abstraction. It is a selection of words designed to convey certain things stripped of its original function. In the list - the words are free from their usual roles. They are just there. It is the mind that puts them here or there depending on chosen context. In that way - the words on the list are like flies trapped on the sticky ribbon flytrap forced to embroil themselves and roll into makeshift cocoons in order to turn into moths that inevitably will be attracted to the fire of the mind (cue Coil).
The list is incredibly flexible. You can bend them any way you want and still you will be within its boundaries. It can serve as a direct instructions or just some boorish tips or you can simply enjoy the way the words sound together. You can make your own list, rearrange the existing sequence, find some obscure relations and construct some imagery or even narrative out of it, you can even scramble the way the words are written. Finally - you can put it through N+7 OULIPO routine and get entirely new set of verbs.
Немає коментарів:
Дописати коментар