Lauren Hynde
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- Apr 11, 2002
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Among Surrealist techniques exploiting the mystique of accident was a kind of collective collage of words or images called the Cadavre Exquis. The Surrealists were Parisian avant-garde painters, writers, and associates who wanted to use the Unconscious as their resource against the materialism and militarism, among other isms, that distressed them. Led energetically by the poet and novelist André Breton, they would meet daily by the mid-1920s in a Parisian cafe to talk, plan their magazine, cook up stunts and shows, and of course to read their work and play their writing games. These writing games range from those which release the unconscious to more or less direct the writing process--the automatic writing of Magnetic Fields--to those which exploit the chance contributions of collaborators not aware of what their mates were doing--as in the famous Exquisite Corpse writing game. They made writing fun, social, and surprising in what its most apparently 'blind' practise could produce.
The technique got its name from results obtained in initial playing, 'Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau' (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine) and how it works is: a group of people get together and each writes on cue a particular grammatical structure (adjective, noun, verb, adverb, and so forth), then folds the paper over, and passes it on. Once all the parts have been written, the paper is unfolded and read. You don't know what sequence you're writing into, and you cannot control where a piece is going.
I think the start of a new year is a good time to explore our 'unconscious reality in the personality of the group' (or something) but to try something like this, we'll need to depend on PMs a bit.
I'll sort out the mechanics, but first would like to know if anyone is interested in trying this for size.
If we get one or two really good Exquisite Corpses we could maybe incorporate them in a group poem or a same title challenge...
The technique got its name from results obtained in initial playing, 'Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau' (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine) and how it works is: a group of people get together and each writes on cue a particular grammatical structure (adjective, noun, verb, adverb, and so forth), then folds the paper over, and passes it on. Once all the parts have been written, the paper is unfolded and read. You don't know what sequence you're writing into, and you cannot control where a piece is going.
I think the start of a new year is a good time to explore our 'unconscious reality in the personality of the group' (or something) but to try something like this, we'll need to depend on PMs a bit.
I'll sort out the mechanics, but first would like to know if anyone is interested in trying this for size.
If we get one or two really good Exquisite Corpses we could maybe incorporate them in a group poem or a same title challenge...
