Poegles. Justin Hendrix

Tell;” Burroughs, long a firearm enthusiast, had placed an apple on top of Vollmer’s head in order to impress some friends at a party with his marksmanship. The subsequent homicide prosecution looked to be going favorably, as Burroughs had bribed the local authorities, but when Burroughs’ own lawyer had to flee the country after a curious car accident and altercation with the son of a government official, Burroughs decided to follow suit. He was convicted of homicide in absentia. The easy access to drugs made Tangiers a natural destination, but new allegations of illegal drug importation eventually led Burroughs to Paris.

      Gysin introduced Burroughs to the cut-up technique at the so-called Beat Hotel in Paris’s Latin Quarter in 1959. Burroughs embraced the idea as a way to move beyond the conventional works of fiction he wrote while in Mexico, including Junky and Queer, and to grapple with the guilt he felt about the death of his wife. He wrote:

       The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents … writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident.

      Burroughs put the cut-up technique to work and began to develop his more experimental, non-linear approach to writing in a series of stories that were later published under the title Interzone. The subsequent novels he wrote in the 1960s, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express, all made extensive use of the technique. Its seemingly random or mechanical basis for text generation, combined with the possibilities of using text written by other writers, challenged the role of the writer as the primary creator of any written work. More important in this method was the writer’s sensibility as an editor.

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      While Burroughs was dreaming up Interzone, a computer scientist named J.C.R. Licklider was crafting a series of memos that described his “Intergalactic Computer Network” concept. Like Burroughs, Licklider, known affectionately to his colleagues as “Lick,” was a native of St. Louis. He was the only child of an insurance salesman, and as a boy he spent hours alone in his room constructing model airplanes. While Burroughs and Gysin were arranging newspaper clippings on Gysin’s kitchen table in Paris, Licklider was advancing the notion that a common global computer network should be created to allow scientists to work together and share information. He wrote:

       In the first place, it is evident that we have among us a collection of individual (personal and/or organizational) aspirations, efforts, activities, and projects. These have in common, I think, the characteristics that they are in some way connected with advancement of the art or technology of information processing, the advancement of intellectual capability (man, man-machine, or machine), and the approach to a theory of science. The individual parts are, at least to some extent, mutually interdependent.

      After beginning his career at MIT, Licklider was appointed head of the Information Processing Techniques Office at DARPA, the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in 1962. He soon convinced his superiors that an all-encompassing computer network was an essential component of the national defense. The basic idea of today’s Internet was born.

      Over the next two decades, as the technology improved and disseminated across the globe, human beings began to amass a vast amount of data and text on the kinds of systems Licklider dreamed of. Suddenly, millions of people were using the Internet to share their work and their art, their thoughts and their feelings, leaving artifacts of their experiences on blogs, wikis, websites and other platforms for anyone to find at the click of a mouse. Business was perhaps first to fully grasp the power of the Internet to collect and organize human thought and behavior. From the ideas explored in The Cluetrain Manifesto to Wikinomics, the potential for humans to innovate and to collaborate with this profound new means of communication is only just becoming apparent.

      But apart from the means to organize useful ideas and information, search engines create the means to sift through the very human artifacts left on the web- the roaring babble of the masses. These tools are also available to the poet, to look for specific scraps of text, to explore the no longer hidden consciousness of a vast swathe of humanity. In the collage of language returned from a simple search query, the poet can find among the scraps clues about himself, about the world around him.

      ***

      What follows is the first collection of poegles as such, though would-be poets have been making poegle-like creations since Gysin sliced his newspapers, Tzara pulled phrases out of a hat, and Lautreamont plagiarized Immanuel Kant, perhaps even since young J.C.R. Licklider was building model airplanes in his childhood bedroom in St. Louis. Each of their works was one part invention and two parts discovery. Likewise with you, Dear Reader, the contents of your own poegles already exist. The words are circulating online, and the vision for their arrangement is peculiarly your own.

      How to Make a Poegle

      Step One

       Type a phrase into a search engine.

      Such as “the last time i saw beth”

      Step Two

       Copy the interesting search results.

      

       1. Beth Lochtefeld

      The last time I saw Beth was in the Nantucket airport I was engrossed in reading trashy magazines as she bounced into the little shop …

      summerinternships.com/BethLochtefeld/Highlights.php - 47k

       2. lmharnisch: Blogging the Wolfe Book, The Lady in Red

      And I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles, and tell my minister, too—that was the last time I saw Beth Short. I did not kill her!’” …

      lmharnisch.blogspot.com/2006/03/wolfe-book-lady-in-red.html - 37k

       3. Truth and Beauty Bombs View People who …

      I am kind of sad because the last time I saw Beth some people said insensitive things and she got pretty mad I hope that’s not the way …

      truthandbeautybombs.com/bb/postorder=asc&start… - 102k

       4. Bemused Musings from Baltimore: Then There Were Cicadas

      That night was the last time I saw Beth. Of course, I mean alive. I see her everywhere. The first time I saw the trailer for the film version …

      bemusedmuse.blogspot.com/2008/there-were-cicadas.html - 88k

      Etc.

      Step Three

       Paste the interesting results onto a single page.

      The last time I saw Beth was in the Nantucket airport I was engrossed in reading trashy magazines as she bounced into the little shop

      And I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles, and tell my minister, too—that was the last time I saw Beth Short. I did not kill her!’”

      July 31st would mark my second year as a known witch.

      the last time I saw Beth some people said insensitive things and she got pretty mad

      That night was the last time I saw Beth. Of course, I mean alive. I see her everywhere.

      The last time I saw Beth … she was at the Moulin Rouge.

      The last time I saw Beth, it was some night in November.

      The last time I saw Beth, she was picking out Christmas cards and I didn’t want to bother her.

      The