Scott MacLeod and Jim Leftwich on IMPROVISED EXTRACTIONS (08.11.2021)

 Scott MacLeod and Jim Leftwich on IMPROVISED EXTRACTIONS

Scott MacLeod

PREFACE to Happy as Larry

Serious Projects Oakland 2022

Most of these poems began as other writers’ poems. I find
and “excavate” my poems out of much longer ones. While
Michelangelo could “see a statue [within a block of marble]
as plain as though it stood before me,” my work becomes
visible only through the act of reductive editing. So when
an acknowledgement says “from” a source, that refers to its
removal from a source. There is often some improvisation,
change of tense etc., but sometimes I make many changes,
or add a significant amount of new material. When I do
this, I call these ‘improvised extractions.” I mean, when I
have to call them anything. To me, this is just a way of
writing. And, as importantly, a way of reading. I’ve been
doing it this way a long time. I work very quickly, and
spontaneously, and consider my work to be “experimental,”
in the sense that I am trying something out in order to see
what happens, and am not usually too concerned with

whether the result is “successful” or not.

______________

August 11, 2021

Scott MacLeod email to Mark Young

and Jim Leftwich

I checked with Jim re: Blame, but realize I haven’t re: Petroleum, so I’m cc:ing Jim & he can weigh in if he wants. I guess it’s gotten to the point that I assume I have carte blanche from him to do pretty much whatever, and that’s maybe not the best way to approach it.

What I generally do (& pretty certain I did with Petroleum and certain I am doing with his Southeast Roanoke Is In Southwest Virginia In The Mid-Atlantic Region Of The United States July 2021) is to pull out words and phrases that interest me, as I read his text. Usually on average I pull out about 5-20% of his words, maybe. 

I start off trying to keep the words in the same order that he used them, and often manage to do that, but I am not strict with myself. I also will change tenses etc if I want to. And I will often begin to write words of my own. Here, I can probably give you a direct comparison between our texts, as I have just begun to work on the latest thing Jim sent me. Usually I destroy his text in the process of ripping stuff out of it, so it’s harder to go back and find places of comparison, but I have only just started in on this one, so it’s very clear what became what:

Waterfall and Frog Pond in the Flower Garden on Mill Mountain

opens the jar pirate piano about 
thought and thinking / for a
lifetime blowing down the open
road like a Russian thistle
tumbling through a Whitman
poem / violence into the rocking
chair remarks which shoe / and
what street, wherever the shoe

ulterior James River does
not flow from Zurich
through Missouri to
Buchanan Kanawha Canal
through Galt's Mill / for
some reason opening 
front row seats on the
frontage road / seasonal
diptychs rusting in the
dirt / dust on the window
through which we glimpse
Queen Anne's Lace and
burdock at the bottom of
a blooming rainbow

between the pronouns painted
uptown and the basket of
socio-coeval independents
barreling up the off-ramp
nova-canine suppression of
official knowledges
in the feral snow they overflow
where our sea-chaff awakens
as wheat

and gave these strident broccoli
their hirsute especial ovals their
cities but nevermind the
kelp the
roots rise up through the spine &
compel from absences and
absolutes
water frequently local
when I am keening vellum walking 
like a tongue on stilts

the crater combs the coral and
the flock of toads alleged
to shrimp notional
mirrors
diminished
to a goal of hints

so much depends so much depends so much depends
so much depends so much depends so much depends
so much depends so much depends so much depends
……..

And here is what I made of this section of his piece:

PUB CRAWL

1. Frankie and Johnny at the Cabaret Voltaire

long shift at the mill blows the day open

lifetimes blowing down the road, pirate radio

opens pandorum’s jar, thoughts like thistles

chair noble tumbleweeds rolling spliffs

Pat Buchanan leaning over the front seats

trying to reach the highball on the bar

the frontage road don’t bring much traffic

anymore, the highway flows through Guilt’s 

Mill, on the other side of Queen Anne’s 

cemetery, on the ulterior side of town

there’s dust between the neon pronouns

and the snow coming down hard tonight

long walk from the factory to the off-ramp

past all the canine risk-suppression systems

caged in chain-link, barreling around to nowhere

erasing their own paw-prints in the feral snow

never mind the strident cities, their ovals, their

circuses, overpasses and local water districts

never mind the diminished notational reflection

my keening voice rises like a flock of tongues

up the crater of my absent spine, falling onto night

like breaking stilts under vellum halo streetlights 

2. THE FROG & WATERFALL

so much depends on the diminished, so much

on looking away, lowering the gaze, forgetting

Etc…...

_________________

If anyone has a better terminology for what I do, please let me know what that would be, and feel free to use it to describe what I do. And if anyone has any problems with what I do, just tell me and I will stop doing it. Or at least I will stop showing it to anyone. Really, I just do this to entertain myself.

(Note: “Waterfall and Frog Pond” made me think immediately of English pub names, hence “Pub Crawl” and all the section titles being or including pub names.)

Maybe it should be called “Pub Scrawl”

All best!

Scott MacLeod

______________

Jim Leftwich to Scott

and Mark

Scott.

i use methods similar to the ones you describe here, and i call the results extraction poems, or sometimes improvised extraction poems

i have rules, game rules, guides for the self-perplexed, customized map-books, arbitrary policies, subjective laws of psychosomatic physics, a poetics of the slinky, a poetics of silly putty, absurdist arithmetic, free Abulafian jazz, but i didn't come to the poem in search of rules

poems are pragmatic anarchists

imagine participatory democracy taken to its logical conclusions

of course you have carte blanche, with or without checking in with me

----jim