Kathy Acker; the cut-up technique and other things that blew my mind last night...

This is Kathy Acker. She might just be my new favourite find whilst researching out here in Norway. In a nutshell, she focuses on experimental literature and some of her books take a very non-linear narrative path. She also uses collage in her literature. So letters, newspapers, photography etc. can be used together to make up one complete narrative structure. I love this. Like, really love this. I'm not saying that I could recreate it but it's definitely something to be open to. I love the idea of realising the limitations of language and trying to overcome it. There is no reason why we shouldn't overcome it with what is available today technologically.

I have also been researching electronic literature a bit. However, I'm not sure I'm there yet. Or ever will be.

Looking at Acker led me to read up a bit more on William S. Burroughs who I touched on vaguely at uni but was probably to concerned with what I was going to wear that night in town to pay much attention (!)

He came across a way of writing called the "cut-up technique" and basically it's just cutting words from a sentence and rearranging them and hey-ho - new sentence. He did this in the 70's but it had been going on strong long before then. Dadaist poets of the 20's would put written words into a hat and pick them out one by one to create an entirely new poem in order to showcase the basics of the Dadaist manifesto. However, Burroughs was one of the pioneers of it's revival later on.

He was also a fan of the "fold-in" technique which would take two pages of words; fold them both vertically and join them both together to create a new, fully understandable work.

This ability to technically construct your work so that it can work successfully on a variety of levels surprisingly is a new thing for me. I mean, I've always known in would work poetically but I can't write poetry for shit and I don't intend to try now. But being able to do this successfully with prose just seems like such a hard task. Maybe I'm not there yet. I can give it a bash though.

To be continued, once I wade through the pile of information I've tried to catalogue today...