Ananda Roopa brought me an old book he had found at home while cleaning out. He wasn’t exactly sure where it had come from, but thought it had belonged to his mother-in-law who had taught English lit at high-school level. He said there were many books being cleared out from his home right now, but this had somehow appealed to him, and because of this, he had taken it to The Temporary Art Repair Shop. I could clearly understand why. In a way, an anthology of poetry and prose like this was a kind of physical embodiment of an English lit teacher. Not enough time to really go deeply into any specific poet or writer, and most of the little brats don’t care that much anyway, but instead a comprehensive and organized rush headlong through literary history, starting with Beowulf and finishing with, well someone at least 50 years dead by now, God protect us from contemporary literature. This first band dutifully started with Beowulf, but since it was only the first of several bands, it reached no further than Blake.

So, to create an even denser condensation of the old anthology, I decided to focus on Blake. After all, he was the last in the band, the most contemporary of them, the one handing the batten over to the future so to speak. But what was I going to do with him? Leafing through the ten or so pages with a selection of his poems, I was struck by how consistently he was writing. Not just that he of course followed the traditional anatomy of a poem, with most of them divided into between 3 and 5 stanzas of between 4 and 6 lines each. Furthermore, the content of the stanzas was such, that I felt they followed a certain pattern, not all together clear to me. To explore it, I decided to turn the Blake part of the anthology into just one concentrated poem, relying on the structural similarity between all his poems but encompassing the entire selection. However, I didn’t want to pick and choose, which would have been far to easy and would surely have produced a lovely kitschy poem, but wouldn’t have tested my hypothesis that Blake was following an internal logic of his own not just formally but also with his content. So, I made a Blake cut-up.

To produce the text I obeyed the following rule: Take the first half of the first line in the first stanza in the first poem. Then the second half of the first line of the first stanza of the second poem. Then continue with the first half of the second line in the first stanza in the third poem. Complete it with the second half of the second line in the first stanza of the fourth poem. And so on. Meaning, I cut out half a line at a time, and between every cut I moved on to the next poem, but to the position in that poem following correspondingly after what I had just pasted on the paper. When I got to the end of the list of poems, I went back to the first again. That way I slowly worked myself through poems and stanzas until I had produced a poem as long as the longest of Blake’s. With this I mean it had 6 stanzas, which his longest had, but only 4 lines each stanza since that was his most common type. The text that produced itself in this way, I called Blake-Out, and pasted on a black card which I framed.