Dorothy Alexander

Poetry and fiction in Scots and English

Inside

  • Welcome
  • About
  • cage
  • eco series/Final Warning
  • ballads
  • Mined
  • Artlink Project
  • Hawick Missal Fragments Project
  • The Mauricewood Devils
  • Current projects
  • Creativity generator workshop
  • Events archive

ballads

This an ongoing project which brings oral narrative tradition into creative collision with my own experimental writing processes wherein vocabularies are extracted from found text and used as word pools to create new work. The groundwork for this was done at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in 2007/08.The upshot of this is that I am writing a series of fifty-word narratives based on recorded memoirs in Scottish Borders Council’s Memory Bank – fifty words being the maximum number of words that we can memorise verbatim without recourse to the written word – and using these as found texts. My intention is then to use material created out of these as (new) found text, and continue to do this to as many levels as I can. To date I have taken one text to three levels: Jenny Corbett → their burn assuaged → in a parallel day → poems out of in a parallel day. The next level would see one of these poems being used as the base text for generation of a new vocabulary from which further poems would be created and so on.
     This is a time-consuming (one short text can generate over twenty pages of new/found vocabulary) and potentially infinite process. It may be mad! But it is totally absorbing and exciting. My hope is that once there is a certain mass of poems and prose fragments, longer narratives will be pieced together from them: The bursar wis a sadist was my first effort at doing this (see below and down). Also see Vimeo for short films incorporating sections of The bursar wis a sadist - lips sigh red and trrring

The bursar wis a sadist. gied
Jill and emily strip rash.
swilled bleach ower their
sclera, pain streetched Sheer
an (Shh) Cuttin (Shh), cleats
an. . .ach raw an cowered on
the spar, tethert an teary, sun
gildin the lichen, the bursar
whistlin a Stabat mater.

 

trrring

         a gal
  sliced in a diorama
 her mAntic fits
            remitting
haemaconia   tela   Antigen  transistor 

her leman slurs his telomeres
         there in the arena
    boAsts fastened to the wind

 

 

                       pauline adored lily
                       predicted the assault
bastard
                          wrought
                    gouge and stipple
        his rage adorned with scarlet    

 

                             thus

         slither

               lie

                lieder

 

 

    lips
         sigh

                      red

                      

                           wire

                   stripe

              warped

                  in

                    veritas

 

                        la

 

                        la

                        la

                        la

 

                        la

 

her sister sat in weeds
     bruises splayed their beauty
  in tints
that
         leached thunder
that
uttered shame

wind lilted

                     the grass

threaded inertia
   into
                     the details 

 

 

this riled
      beryl

                she helped

trundled lily into the shade
       slathered lye on whipspread burrs
             their uterine reds
                   layered sine die

                   there

                   there

                           said beryl

 

 

nurse arthur pleached gowans
       their pollen
    a slurred and pastel drench
        her lips brushed sweat
                the scent of iodine
              her mind bitten
           with lewd instance
   pelma    sebum    nailbed    cunt

 

 

         damn amour

   its
seed and starshine
   its
     mould frAntic
         gold bleeding

from

   its

        hinge