Poegles. Justin Hendrix
A Short History of Poegles
“Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.”
- John Ashbery, “Hotel Lautreámont”
What is a poegle?
A poegle is a poem that you make from other people’s words. Type a phrase, such as “before the war,” into a search engine, then copy and paste the resulting sentences that contain the phrase. Next, edit the sentences – subtract words, change tenses, rearrange the order – until you have a poem, or poegle. Anyone can make a poegle. The raw materials may come from others, but the poegle is the poegler’s own.
1
Like other experiments in the avant-garde, poegles were conceived in France and came of age in America. But their story begins not in France but in Uruguay, in Montevideo, in 1847. As the city lay under siege by the invading Argentine army, the wife of the French consular Francois Ducasse, Jacquette-Celestine Davezac, gave birth to a son, Isidore. Jacquette died shortly thereafter, the victim of an epidemic exacerbated by the wartime conditions. It was the first but not the last tragic circumstance of Isidore’s short life.
Ducasse’s father sent him to study in Paris at the age of thirteen. Though he excelled in math and the visual arts in school, he was drawn to literature, showing a particular fascination with the works of Edgar Allen Poe. He published his first complete work of poetry, Les Chants de Maldoror, in 1868 under the name Comte de Lautreamont. There was no mystery as to the origin of Ducasse’s noble title: he made it up. Though Ducasse had to go to Belgium to find a publisher for his book, he enthusiastically recommended his work in a letter to the greatest living French writer of his day, Victor Hugo:
You cannot believe how happy you would make one human being, were you to write me a few words. Can you also promise me a copy of each of the works you are going to bring out in the month of January? And now, having reached the end of my letter, I look upon my audacity with more composure, and shudder at having written to you. I who in this century am nothing yet, while you, you are its Everything. Isidore Ducasse.
For his next (and last) work Ducasse turned away from the despair of Maldoror and aspired to produce something more hopeful: “I replace melancholy by courage, doubt by certainty, despair by hope, malice by good, complaints by duty, scepticism by faith, sophisms by cool equanimity and pride by modesty.” For this task, he enlisted a little help from his friends. Ducasse took quotations from Pascal, La Rochefoucald, Kant, and Dante and sprinkled them throughout his text, without attribution. As he explained in one of the Poesies’ most famous passages: “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It closely grasps an author’s sentences, uses his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one.” The Poesies also represented a break in Ducasse’s opinion of the likes of Victor Hugo:
Since Racine, poetry has not progressed one millimeter. It has regressed. Thanks to whom? Thanks to the Great-Soft-Heads of our epoch. Thanks to the sissies, Chateaubriand, the Melancholy-Mohican…Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Socialist-Grouser…Edgar Allen Poe, the Mameluke-of-Alcohol Dreams… Victor Hugo, the Funereal-Green-Beanpole…and Byron, the Hippopotamus-of-the-Inferna-Jungles.
Ducasse, however, never finished the Poesies. In July of 1870 Napolean III declared war on Prussia, and by September, Ducasse once again found himself living in a city under siege. He became ill with fever, and with public health services at a minimum, he died on November 24th. The owner of the hotel where Ducasse had been living made arrangements for his burial in a provisional grave.
2
Years after Napoleon III, the Second French Empire and indeed Ducasse had passed away, another war would profoundly influence a new generation of French artists and writers. World War I scattered the populations of Europe, shredded established ideas and produced artists like Andre Breton. Breton counted the Comte de Lautréamont among his influences. By the time of the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Breton had established himself as the leader of that movement. This new school of art spread around the globe, as artists and writers experimented with methods of generating unexpected juxtapositions, non sequitur, new and fresh associations and elements of surprise.
Breton and his associates experimented with spontaneous, or ‘automatic’ writing, in order to explore what Freud called the hidden unconscious. At the same time, ready-made, or ‘found art’ was adopted by the Surrealists. Breton declared found art to be “manufactured objects raised to the dignity of works of art through the choice of the artist.”
But it is not Breton who counts among the fathers of the Poegle, but rather two men that ran afoul of Breton. One was a Romanian. The other was a Canadian. The Romanian was Tristan Tzara. In the 1920s, Tzara took the stage at a Surrealist rally and proposed creating a poem by pulling words from a hat. This simple suggestion caused a riot, and led Breton to expel Tzara from the Surrealist movement. Tzara defined this controversial method in a poem:
To Make A Dadist Poem
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
Later Tzara’s method would be rediscovered by Brion Gysin, a Canadian artist who came to Paris in 1934 to study at the Sorbonne. He joined the surrealists, and a year later was part of an exhibition at the Galerie Quatre Chemins with artists like Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, and many others. For some reason, before the exhibition opened, Breton ordered Gysin’s pictures taken down and later expelled Gysin from the movement.
Despite this early setback, Gysin went on to become a great artist. One night in the 1950s, he was mounting paintings. He put newspapers down to protect the table from being scratched while he cut the papers with a razor. As he cut, he noticed that the slices of paper created interesting juxtapositions. He began cutting articles into sections, which he then rearranged. This process produced a book, Minutes to Go. Gysin became extremely excited by the cut-up technique, as it became known. He later wrote that “writers don’t own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? ‘Your very own words,’ indeed! And who are you?”
3
Gysin was an associate of an American living in Paris at the time named William S. Burroughs. Burroughs had come to France by way of New York, Louisiana, Mexico, and Tangiers, with each move dictated by the necessity of escaping criminal prosecution. Born in St. Louis, Burroughs originally settled in New York on the strength of a family stipend he received as the grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs Adding Machine, William Seward Burroughs I. After being arrested for forging a narcotics prescription and serving a brief house arrest back home in St. Louis, Burroughs and the woman who would become his common law wife, Joan Vollmer, left New York and settled in Louisiana. He then fell under suspicion for conspiring to import marijuana into the United States from South America, so Burroughs and his family fled to Mexico, where he intended to wait out the five year statute of limitations for drug trafficking.
In Mexico Burroughs shot and killed