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