If you can't say something nice, say something surrealistic.

I know some of you out there in the blagowubbs aren't fans of out-there, surrealist poetry. But I am. Pretty much all of the DE crew is, it seems. I don't know if it's merely chance, or if there really is, as many have suggested, "something in the water." Then again...maybe it's the corpses...

Corpses

The "exquisite corpse," is a playful little method for writing poems (in our case), wherein one person writes a bit, and then the text is passed to someone else who continues where they left off, and so on, until the group determines the poem is completed. Often, additional rules are contrived and agreed upon at the beginning of the exercise, e.g. "Two lines per addition," or "Every line must contain an internal rhyme or half-rhyme (like that one)," etc.

We are quite fond of the exquisite corpse, and while most people strive for fluency of text and coherent narrative, we tend to delight in using "corpses" as an excuse to effectively backhand the English language, while pushing the limits of indecency and absurdity as far as we possibly can. Having said that, story lines, though utterly ludicrous, do emerge, as well as regular characters, though they are in most cases horrifically reprehensible. If the authors "corpse" together enough times, they they begin to recognize each other's regular story beats, develop a standard cast of characters, and create relatively coherent narratives without losing any of the absurdity and language "blendering" we love so dearly.

We have been corpsing since the Fall of '02. But we are not the first group of DE poets to fall in love with the insane capabilities of the corpse form. In the late sixties, a group of "heads" from Newark were doing the same things--albeit with significantly greater chemical assistance--storylines, characters, blendering and all.

The compilation which they created was finally titled, "The Black Angello Manuscripts," after their main character, a private-eye named Black Angello, and currently resides in the Special Collections of the University of Delaware's Morris Library. Many of us have read the entire thing, and every now and then while hanging out the DE crowd, you might hear us quote them, e.g. "Violence is like a melody," which we use as an adage describing effectively glorified gunfights, car-chases, Tarantino films, etc.

We, this current crop of corpsers, are now also beginning to bequeath our collections (organized in chronological order by year) to the Morris Library, and to our amazement, they are being accepted!

So, one day in the far future, some poor schmuck in the English department who needs a controversial topic for their thesis, can sift through our attempts to gaslight humanity via exquisite corpses, looking for themes, and weaving the tangled threads of our storylines into a huge, ugly sweater, or booties, or something.