Michael McClure's Personal Universe Deck

Last week in my Creative Writing II course, I distributed copies of Michael McClure's "Cinnamon Turquoise Leather: (A Personal Universe Deck)" from Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute, Vol. 1, ed. Anne Waldman & Marilyn Webb, (Shambala, 1978). This talk contains detailed (and often hilarious) instructions on how to make the "Personal Universe Deck" of the title. I've tried to condense and streamline those instructions here. First, you will need the following materials:

pencil, paper, semi-dark room, a personal universe, fifty or more unruled 3 x 5 cards

Once you have these, go through the following steps:

1. Sequester yourself away from all company with nothing but a pencil and paper, preferably in "a semidark room without even a cat there." Candlelight is preferred, but "a dim desk lamp" will do.
2. Make a list of 100 words "that exemplify your past, your present, and if you can imagine, your future." A few rules governing the choice of these words:
3. All the words "must sound good together."
4. They "can't all come from your angel-food self"--show both your good and bad sides.
5. Minimal repetition is permitted: "if a word comes up obsessively two or three times and you don't notice, if it sneaks in, you may use that word more than once in your hundred words."
6. One or two words of the hundred may be made-up words ("for feelings you don't have words for").
7. All words "should be bare of endings": no suffixes, plurals, etc. ("all except a few should be absolutely concrete"). Hyphenated words should be avoided if possible.
8. Eighty of the hundred words should be "divided evenly among Sight, Sound, Taste, Touch, Smell," into five groups of sixteen words each.
9. Ten of the hundred words should be "words of movement": for example, "handspring, swim, talk, run, surf, skate."
10. The last ten words should include "parts of the body, names of heroes and heroines, places in the universe, invented words, times of night and day, symbolic signs, totemic animals, birds, and plants, and one abstraction."
11. Put the fifty 3 x 5 cards in a stack next to the paper with the hundred words on it and go over the list at random, transferring two words at a time onto each of the cards until you are finished. The words should be placed on the cards playing-card-style, with one word on one end right side up, and the other word on the other end upside down (or vice versa, of course, depending on which way you're holding the card). You should use "a dark pen with a big tip to write the words in block capitals."

McClure writes:

I don't use [the cards] as seeds for poems and I don't consider the deck to be a poem. Decks are word sculptures. I consider them to be a way of creating spontaneous, subjective, stochastic imagery reflecting the personal self. It is better not to think of this as poetry. Remove yourself from that aspect of it. This needs alchemical, transformational possibilities. If you get into literary areas it's not going to take you anywhere. Think of it as an alchemic word experiment, or as word sculpture.

There are many things that can be done with this deck. You'll know if you made the deck right. If it is done correctly it will get you a little high. It will reflect back your interior and subjective reality models in unusual combinations. You get a little spirit-life from it.

A definition: stochastic means that one has limited the number of chance possibilities, or that one is drawing randomly from a limited number of possibilities. In other words, you'll have a hundred possibilities with the deck. You'll draw from them in random combinations. That's stochastic--as compared to totally random or pure chance. Stochastic is a controlled chance.

Note: even though McClure says here that the cards are not meant as seeds for poems, at the very end of the essay he seems to forget this, and he says you can "make poems with them." I took these last words as my cue, rather than his earlier ones, and had students do an exercise where they first took five minutes or so to write the most cliched love poem they could come up with, and then another five or ten minutes to rewrite the poem, substituting words from their Personal Universe Decks for words in the cliched phrases. Then I gave them a take-home assignment to work further with the results of that experiment to create a more composed and polished poem. The results have been wonderful so far. (I just did a Google search and saw that quite a few other people use this exercise too.)

McClure's definition of "stochastic" has been on my mind as I compose my anagram sonnets ("sonnagrams"?) for NaPoWriMo. I'm enjoying the balance between the aleatory and the "intentional" (in Jackson Mac Low's use of this term) that this form affords. There's something exciting about having a strictly limited field of text to draw from, but within that field having a fair amount of freedom to improvise and invent.

Deadwood and Blank Verse?

The other day in my Shakespeare class we were discussing blank verse and a student commented that HBO's Deadwood was written in it. As I made skeptical sputtering noises, another student said he had heard the same thing. I made some more noises, and we went on with class. I forgot about it until the next morning, when I did some googling to see what I could find on the topic. Sure enough, there were tons of people in chat rooms and on blogs talking about Deadwood's "iambic pentameter." Apparently Sean Hannity even said something about it. What I didn't find were any statements by anyone associated with the show, or by anyone who presented any kind of evidence that they actually knew iambic pentameter from a case of the hiccups. Then I found a link to episode transcripts. After scrolling through them for a while, I was satisfied that I had not been deaf to two seasons worth of metrical dialogue: the show was clearly in prose. Occasionally, there were phrases that scanned, as there will be in any text featuring complete sentences in reasonably complex English. Here's a passage from the pilot episode, spoken by the prospector Ellsworth:

Well here's to you, your majesty. I'll tell you what. I may a fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker. And workin' a payin' fuckin' gold claim. And not the U.S. government sayin' I'm trespassin' or the savage fuckin' red man himself or any of these limber dick cocksuckers passin' themselves off as prospectors had better try and stop me.

I've chosen this passage because it comes the closest of any I read to scannability. Here it is, broken into as near an imitation of blank verse as I could manage:

Well here's to you, your majesty. I'll tell
You what. I may a fucked my life up flatter
Than hammered shit, but I stand here before you
Today beholden to no human cocksucker.
And workin' a payin' fuckin' gold claim.
And not the U.S. government sayin'
I'm trespassin' or the savage fuckin' red man
Himself or any of these limber dick
Cocksuckers passin' themselves off
As prospectors had better try and stop me.

That's actually pretty close--I've seen soliloquies in Shakespeare that are prosodically looser. But believe me: that's as close as it gets by a long shot. Is it great writing? Damn skippy it is. But it can be considered metrical only in the sense that it's as carefully calibrated as the best verse (which, I mention just to make it all more confusing, Pound said should be at least as well written as prose).

Here's an exchange between Calamity Jane and Doc Cochran from episode 2 of the first season:

Jane: You're wrong not to trust him [Seth Bullock]. He formed a party that found that little one among all the dead of her family.

Doc: Didn't he? And didn't he also shoot a man he suspected in the murders? And if I were to confide in him when you circulate my optimism, I mean, wouldn't he say, "When the little one speaks, you'll see I was right, not the Sioux killed her family, but road agents?" And supposing it was road agents, and they hear his talk, where's the little one stand then?

Jane: You got a dark turn a mind.

Doc: I see as much misery outta them movin' to justify their selves as them that set out to do harm.

Here it's not even worth trying to lineate it. What this passage has in common with the first one, though, and with all the dialogue from the show, is its syntactical sinewiness. "Not the Sioux killed her family, but road agents": the grammatical compression here makes the action of the verb, sandwiched as it is between two subjects, both enigmatic and sharp. Add that to the further levels of embedded discourse in Doc's speech, and the overall effect is thrilling. Every character in the show carries around multiple voices in addition to their own, because their speech is so densely textual--each sentence is a little story, full of vividly narrated positions.

Because the dialogue of the show imagines the elevated (and debased) registers of nineteenth-century talk so evocatively, it's inevitable that it would be mistaken for blank verse. The essential quality in iambic pentameter is its adaptability to the standard syntactical patterns of the English language ... up until the turn of the twentieth century or so (in America, at least), when a rising tendency towards parataxis made the older metrical forms, with their reliance on hypotactic structures, seem increasingly stiff and unwieldy. The best verse in iambic pentameter over the past hundred years has succeeded by virtue of its baroque manneredness, whereas in earlier periods it succeeded by virtue of its relevance to the dominant mode of polite discourse.

Anagrams

The pleasure taken in anagrams has to do with the indulgence of the fiction that words and phrases, at the molecular level of the letter, retain a microcosmic imprint of their total sense, so that when rearranged, those letters still produce a configuration of relevance to the original arrangement. In this fiction, total content is not a product of contingent syntactical relations, and thus accessible only from certain conventionally situated grammatical vantages, but is one big basic eternally microscoping deep atomic fact that one can pry into and apprehend at any point on the grid. It's interesting to look at this as a metaphor for beliefs about social action: in particular, the belief that individuals can, by local acts of resistance or deviation against dominant formations, set in motion larger patterns of transformation. You know, like by protesting and voting Green and so on. I fear that if I pursue this line of thought any further, it will take a dark turn.

ADDENDUM: No, wait, I think I've mapped out the metaphor all wrong. It's from a position of investment in the dominant system that local reconfigurations are irrelevant in view of the total picture.

I'm thinking now of those demonstrations of how you can change the order of the letters in every word of a sentence, leaving only the first and last letters in their starting position, and most people will still have no trouble reading the original message. For example:

Wehn I do cnuot the ccolk taht tlles the tmie...

Of course, it helps that most sentences have plenty of words with only 1-3 letters in them. But at any rate, once you start scrambling things further, it gets harder and harder to retain the total message:

Hewn I od untoc eth lckco htta esltl hte etmi...

And it gets even more difficult once letters start moving from word to word, at which point you really do kill the semantic organism via which that message was able to be transmitted in the first place, and a new organism, or none, arises in its place:

Withhold hemlock lettuce atheist content....

So the point is, there is just enough capacity for containment along early stages of the anagrammatic process that it's easy to discourage the prospect that a more thoroughgoing transformation can ever occur....

Not to get too carried away with a metaphor. I'm starting to feel like one of those guys who paste up mimeographed screeds on public bulletin boards explaining how microwave ovens are instruments of government thought control.