the first time tristan tzara put his hand
into a bag with clippings from newspapers
of individual words and started rapping
at the cabaret voltaire,
after william burroughs extended this
method and instead jumbled up paragraphs
and even sentences rather than single words
to avoid being poetically terse:
and later proclaimed that writing is 50 years
behind painting... you can still get
it wrong in terms of defining the mood of
an era of a method... preceding them was
piet mondrian - with that new york grid
depiction in the vein of minimalistic cubism...
just squares and lines... what tristan tzara
stumbled upon was how to translate a jackson
*******, or a kandinsky with words into words -
the chaotic splatter of colour into ink monochrome;
it really isn't that easy to write out a jackson *******,
it requires a sort of automation, a knowing automation,
it's primarily intuitive - you don't know what
the exact content will be in each case, but you do
know that you're writing in a context of translating
your very own kandinsky - even though you're
not necessarily looking at an example of kandinsky's work;
but let's be pedantic, first tzara, then mandrian,
then burroughs, the painters retreated into
mathematics and a theory of colour, putting them
on equal footing with plato's theory of forms,
but to get the setting, poets scout, poets are scouts,
writers of fiction are the actual army, who
come with bulging sentences, clear depictions
(clearly blood will be shed, the uproar of two sides
clashing and the sharpening of swords
and the swift swooning down of sharpened pin-like
arrows with hussar wings to frighten even more),
poets scout the new territories - the plateau
is never jumbled in fiction, such writers set out
with clear vision and aim at running for miles
without anything changing, but scouts enter
difficult terrain... many twists, many turns,
such obstructions as trees, mountains, bees
butterflies and seances of witches, not to mention
gnarling wolves - for these scouts are obstructed
by images, and because of that, some of them
report very little for the army of paragraph
hunters... but some join rank with them,
after all the scouting is done - they too take up
a weapon and stand shoulder to shoulder
with the giants like tolstoy - although lessening
the narrator's role a little.