Slow Descent into Cave Boss

and other chaotic (Cave Bossic?) explorations of experimental sound poetry

Recently, I took part in a poetry reading at Bulldog News in the U District. It’s a super sweet reading series organized by local poet Eric Acosta, a little node of the network of human thought and art and interaction that makes up human culture. At the reading, Eric and fellow poet Reed Lowell invited the audience to help them read (or chant, really) a piece they’d written that repeated and riffed on the phrase “Syntax tomb salt star.” It was a cacophanous, nonsensical, slightly exhilarating encantation and then the night moved on.

But I took home my printout of the poem, and brought it into my online class. And thus began the kind of poetic exchange that makes writing poetry cooler than sitting alone in your mother’s basement.

What were Eric and Reed doing in this poem? Did it make sense? Nope! Was it just random words? No, no there was a pattern, a rhythm, a music.

Then we tried writing our own:

lion lasso lark

lion lasso lark shark

flying castle park

Trying table parking

Shining battle shark

lying passle hark

lying lion park

Tree tassel bark

trying hassle snark

flying  shark bark

sitting dog bark

park flying shark

cyan, vowing, mark

Latin lion canon

crying paddle mark

Zion El Paso embark

mark lark park

Lying flying bark

Saying, slaying, singing

Tying able part

Prying, maple, start

lightning flying tarp

frying table part

Hiding saddle shark

flying castle top

Flop, mop, stop

lion castle lark

It turned out so awesome, I sent it to Eric. And he wrote back to my class:

This makes me so happy! I've read it so many times. And I smile each time.
I love how they all just dug in and found whatever was in these word streams as their complete selves, it's all so unique, and not just phonetically alive, but poetically, it just crackles with energy.

Did someone invent the word passle? That's the best. Words should always be made up. And who mentioned el paso!? That's where I'm from!

Thank you so much for sharing this with me.
I'm very happy to know that the poem sparked a generative  conversation
on poetry, and this super fun poem.

Then I wrote one with my Friday Seattle class:

They chose to echo Eric’s form of having a chorus phrase and riffing phrases:

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

carrish come thing meet rain

fryfish bumping great pain

crybish lumping sheet bane

scarfish dumping e crane

largif rumping feet slain

larkish coming reek sane

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

larpish crusting yeet game

glarpish crumbling yaysh ain

barkish sundry geet lane

fartish farting reeeeet bang

grootish drawing seat lang

brutish blaring sweet slang

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

starfish something yeet brain

I was thrilled to see them work together to create and follow the pattern, and to infuse it with their own 11-12 year old awesomeness. "Fartish farting reeeeet bang" — now that’s a line nobody’s boring English teacher¹ wrote.

Again, we sent it to Eric, and again he wrote back with a generous and celebratory observation of what the class was doing poetically. He said, among other things, that their poem “starts to vortex in and push more out, like a star birth,” which was the perfect metaphor for this space-obsessed class.

The teen class gets involved:

I kept going. My teen writers in my online Exploratory Writing Workshop gave me some great arched eyebrows when I broke out “Syntax tomb salt star.”

“My parents will think I’m summoning something!” one of them said.

Eric, when I sent him their poem, responded to that thought:

Yes! Poetry is a summoning! Summon love! Summon courage and anger and joy and life! Summon everything that doesn't make sense! Summon memories! Summon dreams! In repeating phrases, in creating words from the sound of other words, you are summoning. You are calling into the back of your mind with every association the origin word has for you and the mind responds with not just a like sounding word, but a word that has the same feel. Words are thought and feeling entwined.

In the alchemy of this exchange, a kid’s quip turned into a beautiful lesson in poetics and the power of language.

The teen class gave their poem the tongue-in-cheek title “The Headache Poem,” because of its mind-numbing repetition of sounds and cadence, but they also hope to publish it, which is why I will just quote the first two stanzas here:

Sand cedar book cherry

hand leader look berry

hand feed her took wary

canned bleeder hook prairie

Sand cedar book cherry

Band leader cook berry

Bland leader took sherrie

land leader took prairie

I love the breadth of vocabulary in this poem, which brings in so much of the world, and the way they used a very strict rhythm and form to channel the nonsensical words.

Then came my Wednesday class:

They took us on what they called a “Slow Descent into Cave Boss”:

lettuce ritz shirt cheese

let us rip curtains please

better its flirt sneeze

bet us rich hurt bees

get us Rick dirt deez

met us snitch blurt knees

Guinness mitts Kurt leaves

menace kits alert keys

spinach pits Burts lees

set us huts lurk trees

henna blitz skirt peas

vet us skids clerk seize

retina bliss tear geez

Vecna clicks twerking chez

vets lits nert cheddar

I enjoy how the poem gets further from sense, and closer to the edge of “acceptable” language as it goes.

Is this the cave boss? Or are you?

And again Eric wrote back (so much generosity in honoring the kids’ work):

I love how the further you get from the seed the less necessary it becomes.
The writing process aligns with the focusing of the mind on instant connections and the poem starts to become a site of generation:
lettuce becomes better, spinach, retina, vets lits.
ritz morphs in to its, rick, rich, bliss
Each word relates to the others around it. Each one influences.  
I like the introduction of names and products and emotions. As the poem moves, what starts to shine through is each author's real lived realities.
While the play is on sound, and trying to get the words that have the same phonetics, what the mind inevitably does is bring out associations of thoughts and feelings:  Cheese and cheddar. Henna leaves bees lees trees. Guinness and vet us. Snitch and blurt. Lettuce and peas and pits. Hut lurk trees. Ritz shirt rich, snitch mitts blitz clicks keys,  chez  ("c'est magnifique") curtains flirt skirt bliss twerk, skids hurt lurk tear get us, dirt deez seize, and lits nert invokes in me the idea of inert, which ties to vets and shirt and menace and clerk and even lettuce.
It's phonetically fun, physically alive, but it also makes the thinking mind race.

And it loops around:

Back at the next Bulldog News Poetry Night, Eric read two Frog Hollow poems, “lion lasso lark” and “starfish something yeet brain.” Read isn’t quite the right word. Performed. Here it is, curious readers. (Poems start around 2:00. Authentic poetry reading atmosphere before that.)

I brought the recording back into class, where the kids had some great reactions, including a spontaneous repetition of “brains….brains….brains” along with the recording.

“I’m mentally scarred,” said one student.

“They say ‘something’ like they don’t know what the word is supposed to be. That's cool.”

“I think about words in new ways. Like we think of them as tools but they are also toys. Like legos. And you don’t just have to use them to build the set.”

“Modern art! Someone nailed a banana to the wall and called it art!”

And another kid hoped that this would make us all rich and famous. Which to my knowledge has not yet happened.

And now you:

But it’s not over yet, because now you’re reading this, and maybe you will try this at home, or with your students, or in your mother’s basement and who knows what will happen next in this conversation we call literature.

How do you try? Put a few words together that satisfy you. Then play with words that echo off of them, not in meaning but in sound and feeling. Repeat things in the way that feels right. You can work line by line, or vertically. Work alone, or with others. Then, say it out loud. And if you like, send what you write to me.

1. Presuming boring English teachers even exist, under the veneer.