Hard Craft

It’s week five of the Surreal Art, Magical Poetry course, and, flanked by the appropriately bizarre productions on display in the Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia exhibition, the group are reading out the fruits of last Monday’s class. This previous session, it seems, was hard work – although you wouldn’t be able to tell from the poems that emerged from it. The pieces are strikingly experimental and individual, ranging in tone from the cheekily irreverent to the intimate, and studded with the kind of Duchampian images that would make Marcel & Co proud.

Pascal Petit, the course leader, shows me the task that generated these poems – and which caused such a headache. She hands me a piece of lined paper split vertically down the middle, one side of which is covered with the text of Octavio Paz’s essay on Marcel Duchamp’s The Bridge Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). So far, so innocuous. Then, Pascal informs me, on the other side each of the group had to write a true account of a personal sexual experience. Then the paper was sliced in half, before being cut up again along each line, leaving each participant with a confused jumble of the personal and the Paz. From this melange, the writers had to tease out words, images and phrases, before moulding them into their own poem. I’m beginning to see how this might have been quite a challenge.

As a listener, it’s fascinating to hear how certain images from the Paz essay – notably a sublime Milky Way and a conspicuously gaseous crocodile – are reworked by each individual, undergoing transformations and permutations with each stroke of the pen. The influence of the Duchamp piece – its complexities, machine imagery and sexual politics – is strongly apparent.

Equally apparent is the change that the group has undergone during the course: having been present at the first session (where the group were nudged into the deep end of the writing pool by being asked to write a poem in five minutes), it’s noticeable how confident and relaxed they have become. After the challenges of last week, session five is a much more tranquil affair: the group are given free range of the Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia exhibition and told to base their poem around the image that most appeals to them. Although the writers might well be glad of a break, the graft of the prior session really has paid off – and, after all, its not often that a course leader gets to compliment a class for it’s 'great poems from the sex exercise'.

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