Exquisite corpse to die for
A surrealist poem workshop at the Japan Writers Conference
Last October, I attended the Japan Writers Conference in Tokyo, a free two-day event that includes lectures and workshops from international writers about various aspects of the writing process. It was a great opportunity to mingle with the writing community, discover new authors and sharpen my penmanship.
All the lectures I took part in were great, whether it was scrutinasing steamy sex scenes with Evan Fallenberg or getting schooled on point of view by Michael Pronko. But the exquisite corpse workshop held by Mark Yakich and Loren Goodman was absolutely brilliant. Rest assured though, it didn’t involve anything weird with an actual cadaver.
Exquisite corpse consists of assembling a text or an image collectively. Each participant adds to a composition in sequence, only allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed. It was invented in the 1920s in Paris at the start of the surrealist movement by its main founder André Breton along with Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, and Marcel Duchamp.
The workshop was attended by a small group of mostly self-proclaimed poets. Sitting in a circle, we all wrote on a page the first sentence that came to our mind. Each participant then passed it to the next person leaving only the last few words visible by folding the page. We kept pouring our minds on paper that way until all the pages were filled up.
The resulting texts below were nothing short of amazing! We read them aloud at the end and it made us scratch our heads, burst out laughing and marvel at their poetic beauty in equal measure. Despite a few grammatical issues, it’s surprising how much of it makes sense.
Calculus pudding
And I said this doesn’t make me a man any more than his fingers left stain marks on remembered summer days I often slept empty. I need to be refuelled with Biodiesel twice every three weeks they rose from the grave. It looked like, like when you say like, like when you know you know truth divides, falsehood multiplies; anger subtracts, love adds; wisdom squares roots and happiness is like calculus his voice calibrated to his eyeglasses. When do you think it would be a concrete onomatopoeia like “wow!” or “bam!” but who would ring the water out of my hair? Who would shave my armpits? Who would do the thing that I hope not to before becoming eels. My loss of bones remember what happened? Did it make any difference to anyone whether the tide came in or the cat crooked as cats had become known to do and then some more dogs trotted through the pudding, leaving silky chocolate paw spots.
“When do you think it would be a concrete onomatopoeia like “wow!” or “bam!” but who would ring the water out of my hair?”
God’s siblings
When she came to my apartment, the typhoon was about to morph into sixty-six non-consecutive pieces of laminated sauerkraut. “Girl, what is that?!” It’s a monster from the planet of last night’s torrents stuck in a bad dream will really screw up your day. But coffee burned all the way down, sharp, poking bracing in hiding facing in the open and frothing at this duplicity of self I believe is something not quite as bad as duplicity of selfishness because I like myself and I LOVE fish. The pores in my hands are reaching out to you. Good luck and never come again here or else I will find your siblings and bring them to God. Bring them to the ends of what may be exactly what I can’t ever give you.
Selective supplication
Blue balloons burst into knives white icing the sun on top of me, or not me. Is it each of us who beg for water when we aren’t thirsty say we will shrivel up without new Aveeno daily moisturizer. Available at your local radioshack, while supplies last between now and Sunday when you come or go in supplication to the supplier of needs, demander of deeds, I bow down before you in supplication, sipping a glass of crystal clear spring water and a partial defragmentation. Selective, but also truly abnormal if the sky wasn’t made of smoke and broke like a rusted chain, a rusted trinket — no, not that cliché again. Falling a stubborn word. A broken line of stars that never light a fire you can’t put out. Never bet something you can’t live without, but can’t live within either.
Blood vegetables
Quiscalus quiscula sounds like it looks — oil-slicked, sharp-beaked, bald, breeding, ducking the breeze otherwise unmovable objects meet otherwise unstoppable force; this is what happens when wisdoms collide. Snowlight, her legs slightly parted, as is often the case with him, but also with his other battered ancestors. It was them who burnt my body beautiful. Onions, parsnips, and any old root vegetables from the garden of leeches. I beg my blood to come crawling back and entertain us. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to rest on the roof of the shed as the sun was the sun and hunger and thirst their same selves. I did nothing that summer. Every day, rain or shine, I did nothing all the same and all the time and let me tell you, Guv’nor, jerking off under luminescent strip lights.
“I beg my blood to come crawling back and entertain us.”
Home improvement fit for a king
It was just bermuda shorts made of banana skins he was wearing. A wound the size of a mouth or a flower’s smallest petal. Did you say pedal? So I push and demand and alchemize just for the money. Nicolas Flamel would have killed to meet King Solomon — but he would always say he would and after did, but not always which was ok except for the fungus, so I took another bite — a bit sour I guess, but when you haven’t eaten for three days, home improvement fit for a king. And I couldn’t help imitating a screaming and convulsive one-legged red snapper. Daddy O daddy, you are so beautiful when you shave — at least that is what mama always said: let your yes be yes and your no John F. Kennedy, sir.
Anything smiling
I have often wondered what it would be like not to like anyone while being liked by every single person in the room except for her husband. Eat until your stomach bursts or implodes. It all depends on your preferred technique, right. The unique part of the eye is the part that no one ever sees. Do you see what outlines trace the sky with red, can you open your mouth and welcome a poem to crawl out of the sewer and drag me to hell like a clown-fear, but generalized to anything smiling, like if someone told a joke and someone else pretended to get it, is it funny? Is it really funny? That’s the first question upon meeting a new person, I always ask. Never tell, hear, call or believe. The sun goes up in smoke like a billion blue balloons bellowing besides the border’s brutal bandits.
