Exquisite Corpses and Other Writing Games

Theory

The Exquisite Corpse is a catchall phrase to describe collaborative and surrealist poetry writing and drawing games. According to lore, about a hundred years ago, a group of silly French poets took some cute little writing parlor games and played and thought and built them out a bunch, then added some grandiose manifestos, and called it a movement. It's just what you did if you were in Paris about hundred years ago. I'm a big fan of little poetry games wherever they come from, and to find a whole movement about them, including grandiose manifestos and romantic 1920s Paris in the 20s... my heart flutters. 

But let's talk fundamentals. The basic principle of writing an exquisite corpse proceeds thusly: participants are asked to provide a word or a small set of words, more or less randomly, and then they mix what they provided with what other participants provided, then we apply a new set of rules and maybe add another set or two, and call it a poem. We have a poem. Through mixing and rule creation, we find an orderliness, or an imposed orderliness, or at least a feeling of orderliness. Perhaps "a feeling of orderliness" is all that poetry actually is, or maybe the most we could expect from it. Feelings and orderliness. So, after all this soft work, we get mixed sentences and stanzas, and often find that they are imbued with unexpected wisdom and beauty and hilarity. Something grand seems to arise from the players' collected purposeless choices, something which was literally created through a collective unconsciousness. 

I'm unreasonably happy when I can play games where chance, rather than determining the winner, determines meaning. Indeterminacy. I'm so fascinated by the idea of indeterminacy. It is akin to randomness and uncertainty, things which can be so rough and painful, but indeterminacy is distinct. It's essential to surrealism, and if you playu with it more, you learn something unexpected about how to approach meaning. Events happen, but they don't really happen for any reason. Things occur without any real purpose to their occurrence. There is causality, of course, but nearly always our encounters with causality is so large that it's obscured multitudes. Such multitueds that  so as to achieve genuine, if not literal, randomness. And yet, despite this invisible and overwhelming multitude of purposeless unreasonablenesses, there is still meaning in what comes from the world. And there is still more meaning in what we ourselves create. 

The first is the mere joy of creating. Put simply, it's just a lot of fun to write nonsense with people. The second is in interpreting it after the fact, in the pure joy of recognizing and taking a close look at this big pile of constructed nonsense. 

Basic Question of Making Exquisite Corpses into Field Games

Writing games, with a bunch of extra silly philosophy thrown in. There are lots of different ways to play them on paper, but what about playing them in a field, with physical movement being an element? Is there a good way to make the body an extra input and output for writing games? I have a few sets for these kinds of games and have played them a few times, but they are still more pieces than sets. They were fun but are still a bit clunky and need more testing and refinement. Regardless, below are a few ideas. 

(also, I need to integrate this question of how to turn writing games into field games into my pieces/sets-theory/method framework. Which is why it's useful to opine on the movement of surrealism and on writing as a theory, as a set of values and schema that we can make interact with other schema, thereby providing more illumination to the pieces/set framework itself. Also, this whole schema needs a deeper look at and dependence on terrain. The lesson of surrealism is about indeterminacy, but, very much, all of this, is heavily determined by terrain.)

Methods

There is the one-sentence-at-a-time-story, where one writer writes a sentence, then passes it to another writer who writes the next sentence. To craft it into a Calvinball Variation, the passing it to another writer involves running or bounding or some such. 

Or there are mixed haiku, where three people write one and then you mix up their lines, and you often get new three haiku that are much better than the three originals. Again, the only thing I really have is they're passed at the end of an interval of running or movement. This needs refinement, though it was nice using Prospect Park's waterfalls and trails as inspiration and backdrop for drafting haiku.  

Or the game of "what is/it is" where each person writes a sentence that starts with "what is" and then another sentence that starts with "it is"  and then you mix them, and get pretty funny definitions of things. It worked pretty well to combine this technique with bounding overwatch, an infantry term, where soldier A yells "cover me while I move" and B yells back "I got you covered" and A runs ahead while B covers, then B yells and A yells back and B runs up while A covers. The change involves yelling poetry lines instead of combat instructions.

There are also the games of the Oulipians, another funny group of French writers, who focused on techniques of constricted writing. They've been described as literary sadomasochists or as "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they then try to escape" (you might know N+7, where every noun in a text is replaced with the seventh noun after it in the dictionary.)

Idea: constrained writings with running interpretations. Just a quick thought I had while flipping through the anthology Postmodern American Poetry. The anthology describes the poet Stephen Ratcliffe's practice of writing a poem about a moment of perception, consisting of seventeen lines and five sentences each with one comma (which moves to a different place in each sentence), which he did every day at the same time. The comma moving around is what gave me the idea. Start one person with creating a short writing, something with a certain duration and a little bit of structure required, like a comma or two clauses, or maybe a syllogism or a haiku. Another person reads the writing, visualizes it as a running route, and explains that route to a third person. This third person then runs it while a fourth watches, and then this fourth writes a sentence that is either interpreting or inspired by that run. Needs testing, and clear instructions but I quite like a sentence determining a running route, and a running route determining a sentence. 

One other constrained writing tool: don't look at the paper and describe or draw something (maybe the movement of a bird or the wind) and then someone interprets that description in movement. Interpretive running? This is a decent piece generally. 

Also, I recently discovered how useful chalk is to play these kinds of games.

A Smattering of Poetic Forms

haiku

What the hell is iambic pentameter?

Poetic forms. It's nice to just pause in this term. And it's immensely useful. What does it mean? Framework, restriction. In poetry, restrictions are immensely useful, as they will be in these little games, where I'm still working out how to turn these word frameworks into movement frameworks. A step. A word. Another step, more words. In writing, this is actually rathe easy. In the ways that writing encounter movement, it's gets much more interesting, and maybe easier, if we have the restrictions of some of these smatterings of poetic form. 

More theory and some incomplete musings about writing

A bit of a messy thought here, but I've been musing on what writing encounters can mean, why I do it, how I do it well, why I think it's worth doing, how I think it redeems us. This little piece and set is a bit rough, but there is also something interesting that I need to wade through first and then dredge. Anyway, here is a first pass...

When I write, I have an impulse. Most of the time I don't know what that impulse is. Words come. I force them to be made. They force themselves. It happens partly by my will and partly by the will of the whatever high atop the thing, and I don't really know my purpose other than some instinct that wants them without really knowing what I'm forcing and I keep going, without really knowing my purpose beyond some vague sense of an impulse, and I make more of them and I go and I keep going... and then the original impulse remembers what it was and comes through in nice ways. 

Writing is about memory and its opposite. 

So much of writing is about encountering life without memory, running in a forest from something chasing us that we don't remember, in a forest where we've never been, and we don't even know what a forest is and we haven't even learned yet that we've never encountered before and we barely remember how to run, but we run. 

And its opposite. Long memory. Deep memory. Every word so referential, networks of sign and symbol...etc (go on like this, but I'm feeling fatigue and need to revisit this part later, but want to get an outline of the arc of this...)

The idea behind Exquisite Corpses is that a strange part is given an active voice. Two or more players play, and they have will and memory and forgetting, and they go, they force and are forced to put together words and write. They encounter a forgetting moment, a will that doesn't remember what was written but actually has a rich and deep memory of a past. These two opposing things encounter, the blank slate encounters the text/history/tradition or precedential experience of having written a lot a lot a lot. And they stumble on each other.

The game is making the story cohere. To dive under something, into a place of deep memories and such deep depths that you can't see anything, and then emerge with a strangely colorful fish, though that fish itself isn't what makes exquisite corpses so interesting. Think of a conversation between three people where one of them isn't real, The real game comes, just as good writing comes, through the arc. Forgetting, yes, please run with me in a forgetting moment with an imaginary animal. And then find yourself, landed hard back on the Earth, with a fourth. You, your friend, your imaginary friend, and then...

Anyway, this needs editing, but I had a sense of how to articulate who these four autonomies are, and wanted to free write about them.