"The Laboratory of Time" by Peter Wortsman

The Laboratory of Time, and other cutup poems, Peter Wortsman’s third collection of experiments in the form, lets time be told in the way we live it, sometimes stretching a second into seeming eternity, sometimes compressing eternity into a second. The first part, titled “The True Glue,” comprises recycled assemblages of words cut out of the newspaper that make a newfangled poetic sense. The second part, titled “The Five Books,” is an admittedly unorthodox retelling of biblical narrative, the poetic sap and zap of it extracted by means of a vertical transcription.
Exhalations burdened with meaning, they are forever being uttered, stuttered and forgotten, trashed and mulched to fertilize new formulations. What else is a cutup poem after all, or any kind of poem for that matter, but a wild flower sprouting out of the dirt!

Turning to the instinctive and tactile art of cut-ups reminds me of how a simple process with text itself can prompt such a depth of discussion and thinking, and open up the author’s otherwise empty mind.

—Sarah Tremlett

This poet’s cut-up poems […] find their roots in Dada poet Tristan Tzara’s méthode découpé, and shares scissors with William S. Burroughs’ cut-up method by which the gunman-junkie-novelist made new poems from old material. Wortsman’s approach differs though from his forbears. Central to both Tzara’s and Burroughs’ programs was production by chance encounter — Tzara advocated drawing cut-up words from a hat; Burroughs cut pages into sections, rearranged them, and sought out interesting juxtapositions. The products of these chance operations intermittently provided revelatory insights and proved capable of expanding past poets’ oeuvres by rearranging their language in a manner reminiscent the Musikalisches Wurfelspiel, or musical dice game, attributed to Mozart, by which one could compose a near infinite variety of waltzes from a small body of musical text. Rather than relying on chance as a generative device, Wortsman reads his source material prophetically, scanning texts, selecting words and phrases that attract his attention, and turning these to his ends. […] …emotionally rich and truly original.

—Marc Zegans

Peter Wortsman self-deprecatingly refers to his cut-up poems as ‘strange assemblages,’ which is what I myself might have referred to them as before I encountered them. But, much to my amazement, they read to me as real poems—poems written with the startling help of a muse I myself would hardly have believed in before I read them. But I most certainly do now. These are works which, indeed, have, magically, been able “to find a form that accommodates the mess.” But what they create is anything but a mess… It is truly, much to my surprise, pleasure and amazement, art.

—Michael Blumenthal, the author of ten books of poems, including CORRECTING THE WORD: POEMS SELECTED & NEW, 1980-2024, forthcoming from The Ravenna Press.

Like a farmer rotating his crops, Peter Wortsman periodically ploughs words back into the mulch of meaning. Romanian émigré DADA poet Tristran Tzara (aka Samuel Rosenstock, 1896-1963) gave it a name: cut-up (or “découpé” in French). Wortsman reverts to cutups when he's too distracted, depressed, dumbfounded or deranged to write in the regular manner. As the isolation of virtual lockdown during the seemingly interminable Covid-19 pandemic stretches into its third year, Wortsman is "a modern-day monk languishing in the solitude of my cell, longing for meaningful communion." Absent belief in a transcendent being, cutups take the place of prayer.

Photographs of the author by Jean-Luc Fievet
Ghost photographs by Peter Wortsman
Directed and edited by Dennis Callaci
Sound by Jacques Bernard Wortsman

Peter Wortsman

Peter Wortsman (photo by Jean-Luc Fievert)
Author of work in multiple modes, including fiction, plays, poetry, and translation from the German, Peter Wortsman was a fellow of the Fulbright (1973) and Thomas J. Watson Foundations (1974), and a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (2010). His work has garnered a Beard’s Fund Short Story Award and an Independent Publishers Book Award, among other honors.