"Slices and Splices," Marian Bleeke and Anne Harris

In advance of this year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies, we (Marian Bleeke and Anne Harris) posted the following CFP on the Material Collective’s Facebook page:

Medievalists, ever want to cut your Kalamazoo paper up into little pieces? Let us do that for you - and turn it into something else. Poetry.
Anne Harris and I are going to be presenting found word poetry based on papers from the conference as "Slices and Splices" in the Blunder panel sponsored by the Babel Working Group on Saturday afternoon. And we need raw materials.
If you would like to see your work transformed, you can either send it one of us in advance (m.bleeke@csuohio.edu or aharris@depauw.edu) or give one of us your hard copy after you present.
We will keep our sources anonymous.

This was the result:

When it was still a word of body, blunder meant to stumble around blindly, to grope about, to lurch and sway numbly. It’s from the Old Norse blundra – “to shut one’s eyes.” It embodies the consequence of the loss of perception, of perspective –especially when the choice not to see is yours, especially when you close your eyes to the bigger picture. Blunder as self-sabotage, blunder as willing yourself to rail against the tempest (or some other enormous thing you can’t control) with your eyes closed. Now, it can be a word of mind, of language action, of event. Now, we can soften the idea with French, a faux pas, more elegant than a blunder, side stepping the issue. Now, right now, with cutting and seeking and groping blindly through words and purposefully shutting our eyes to the big picture in favor of the little words, we can think of blunder as the writer before the thing fumbling for words. Looking at image, text, object, idea and willing the words to come. They do as they please. This is a few minutes in the blunder of language, those few minutes pulled from hours of writing in which the words pull you along, sentences separate from paragraphs, and words jostle the coherence of the page away. This is the fantasy, built on the mistrust of language and the yearning for words of cutting and pasting. I think I love words more than I love language: five, dogma, crenelated, vignette, Coptic, ruminating, contact, gruesome, fostered, perpetrators… I could do this all day. And those aren’t even my words, and yet I love them. I take them from someone else’s paper and savor them. In our blundering, we asked blindly for papers we might cut up. Never mind about meaning, we can blunder through that later. What we asked for, really, was trust. Blunder takes trust. It leans on trust to blunder through the blindness, the misstep, the ridicule, and the realization. To get to the other side of blundering – to open your eyes to see the big picture again. Quick! Close them, back to blunder. Back to the few minutes of every paper in which we trust ourselves to play with a word, take it out of context and let it be, let it become. Is this the prosaic brushing up against the poetic?  We can blunder through that later. This is the fun of blunder, the blind man’s bluff, the lunging and the catching of a word, a phrase, a sentence. The delight in calling it poetry.

And so I have read and been taken by and wanted and took words and this is what happened:

I entreat the audience for help
In my quest for comparable imagery
[for] our much-heralded “return” to the object
objects par excellence
the phenomena that are at work
works [that] call attention to their own facture
unrolled and read aloud
they “speak” of their own significance
girding [their] rhetorical force
by the disruptive presence of that which is supposed to be absent.
Artists turned pigment into glass medieval efflorescence
copying, replication, and remediation
For his tomb announced that he was dead, dead, dead, except that he was still alive!
dozens of copycat tales,
mimetic performativity
Alice thus taunts images
[seeking] some measure of understanding
in this tangle of concerns
just adjacent to the missing segment.

Rupture!

Rather abruptly

the Raising of Lazarus could almost be happening.

Fantastically imagined on a vivid blue ground

built solely on style.

Instead of imagining

the world outside of the window itself.

The web of leading is cut to compose

a break in the path

to the border and to the stars

Illumination was active,

you see here and here.  

Until the swath of green 

glowing and deeply colored

stops the illusion.

To populate the lights

a foreigner, a Frenchman, threw a rock.

And dramatically shifted the opaque decoration,

the darkest creases that dark light so desired,

and the especially problematic painted indications

of shining colors now-destroyed.

 

Something Native

The deposed king inhabited the island

and fabricated memorializing self-identifications;

time consuming indigenous traditions,

reticulated headdresses with elaborate ornamentation,

adroitly dynamic sword handling,

and the active veneration of horizontal continuity

Our lengthy and intimate allegiance to

this thriving concern deliberately kept us

assimilated and assumed a sense of the singular

theoretically allowing our previously prized

ongoing explorations 

to receded into oblivion.

 

Surviving Ensembles

Surviving ensembles 

That descended from above

Promoted brief but spectacular

Astronomical associations

The Golden Wood commanded

Create

Continuity

Long – standing

Further,

More

 

Fierce Prejudice

Illumination is delicate

Like giants towering beside their tower

All scraggly-haired and bulbous-nosed

Ruminating on interconnections that are

Most curious

And utterly spurious

Our lingering fears are rendered again and again like

Apocalyptic hordes only purportedly imprisoned

How estranged we are – yet

Are all interrelated

In harboring a love that was

Already lost at the time

 

Purposes of Procreation

I had analytical approaches

Sumptuous objects

Pairs of peacocks and leonine quadrupeds

And some real work to do

Now, turned inside out, and, indeed, halved

I have penned a monograph

Turned pigment into glass

And now rival creation itself in my 

Mimetic performativity

It is a luxurious document

Girding its rhetorical force with indigo sections

Full-fulio swaths of small gold dots

And a sumptuous silken pastdown

Beautifully bejeweled beneath the golden script

Even its more mundane-looking representational strategies

Are painted to look like precious Byzantine silk

It is a site of replication and re-presentation

A reflection of its partner

And a copy without an origin

 

The Effort of Cutting

The thing after the cutting

Wants to stand and hold fast

Simultaneously bearing witness

To its easily destroyed manufacture

Trees and stones

Are always forever moving towards

Illusions of the analogous, an invented humanity

As statue oscillates after stone

The dice tumbling

Escalate quickly upwards as an immortal god

Obsolete in language if not in practice

Of prayer and poem in their pristine state

What had been whole, an impossible object

Is now molten and messy, everywhere and inexplicable

A reliable source of ignition, of volatile shattering that

Simultaneously explodes and disintegrates into powder

A knife cutting

Forever cut off

As human presence

What a lovely, creepy idea