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Borrowed Words
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 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, a modern-day monk, languishes in the solitude of his cell, longing for meaningful communion. Absent belief in a transcendent being, cutups take the place of prayer.
60 pages, Paperback
Published October 5, 2022
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About the author
Peter Wortsman
48 books28 followersPeter Wortsman is the author of a novel (Cold Earth Wanderers, 2014), thee collections of stories (A Modern Way to Die, 1991, second edition, 2019, Footprints in Wet Cement, 2017, and Stimme und Atem/Out of Breath, Out of Mind, forthcoming in 2019), two stage plays (Burning Words, premiered in 2006, and in German translation in 2014, and The Tattooed Man Tells All, first staged in 2018), a travel memoir (Ghost Dance in Berlin, 2013), as well as a work of nonfiction (The Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard, 2019).
Wortsman is also a literary translator from the German into English of works by von Chamisso, the Brothers Grimm, Heine, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kafka, Kleist, Musil, and Mynona, among others.
He was a 1973 Fulbright Fellow at the Albert Ludwig Universität in Freiburg im Breisgau, a 1974 Fellow of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation in Vienna, and a 2010 Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
His travel texts have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other major newspapers, and were included five years in a row in The Best Travel Writing, 2008-2012, and again in 2016.
His interviews with survivors of the Nazi concentration camps can be found in the "Peter Wortsman Collection of Oral History" at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.
Wortsman is also a literary translator from the German into English of works by von Chamisso, the Brothers Grimm, Heine, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kafka, Kleist, Musil, and Mynona, among others.
He was a 1973 Fulbright Fellow at the Albert Ludwig Universität in Freiburg im Breisgau, a 1974 Fellow of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation in Vienna, and a 2010 Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
His travel texts have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other major newspapers, and were included five years in a row in The Best Travel Writing, 2008-2012, and again in 2016.
His interviews with survivors of the Nazi concentration camps can be found in the "Peter Wortsman Collection of Oral History" at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 25, 2022
Peter Wortsman is a master of many forms. He established himself as one of the pioneers of what would become known as flash fiction, wrote a number of successfully produced plays, and did a speculative novel, all the while engaging with some of the greatest writers of the German language as a translator. With this little book he has produced a delightful divertimento, a group of cut-up poems born of the interplay of chance and intention. The book’s design is an important component of the experience: images of the original word collages face typeset versions of the text, giving us the objecthood of each original juxtaposed with the words extracted as pure language—and to read these poems on the right-hand side of each spread we could easily forget the process and convince ourselves that these small texts, a few breaths of words, were the product of complete control and deliberation—yet it’s the interplay of the random and deliberate that really creates the lives of these pieces. It’s a playful book made from a form of play for the writer. Interestingly, these pieces written in the heart of the pandemic sometimes respond to those times, but for the most part the essential subjects of the poems are process and language itself. As all the poems are dated, I’ll share the one written on my own 65th birthday, which seems to address all of the above:
Nothing is Normal These Days
The convoluted strings of letters,
numbers and dots
look oddly
like time slots,
something other than
the rigid struc-
tures that had defined their days;
everybody travels so fast
they don’t get a chance to slow down –
no one wants to talk
about death.
Nothing is Normal These Days
The convoluted strings of letters,
numbers and dots
look oddly
like time slots,
something other than
the rigid struc-
tures that had defined their days;
everybody travels so fast
they don’t get a chance to slow down –
no one wants to talk
about death.
October 5, 2022
BORROWED WORDS: cut-up poems | By Peter Wortsman | 59 pp. | Bamboo Dart Press | $7.99
The foreward alone is worth the price of admission. Anyone who reads it, will quickly understand that Mr. Wortsman is a master not only of words, as his name suggests, but of sentences as well.
The poems, created from a variety of texts that Wortsman has dissected and reassembled, make clear that he loves to play, as he actually says in “Ode to Nothing Time”:
“I’m not going to lie, / basically I / just like / playing.”
There is, however, another side to these poems: between some of the wittier ones—and sometimes within them—death makes random cameo appearances, as is his wont. We find this, for example, in “Nothing Is Normal These Days”:
“everybody travels so fast / they don’t get a chance to slow down - / no one wants to talk / about death.”
But even when death does appear, one senses that Wortsman is still at play, as if to defy it.
Given its beginning, “Nocturne” feels as if it may have been borrowed from some holy writ: “O shepherd of / dreams, / wanderer of the night...” That feeling continues to the end of the poem.
Some of these poems have a scientific, even philosophical bent, as do the final lines of “Taking a Word for a Walk”:
“It would be meaningless for an animal / to produce a frequency that can’t be heard.”
The thing I love most about this collection is the feeling of randomness that happens to make sense. The way life does...on occasion.
The foreward alone is worth the price of admission. Anyone who reads it, will quickly understand that Mr. Wortsman is a master not only of words, as his name suggests, but of sentences as well.
The poems, created from a variety of texts that Wortsman has dissected and reassembled, make clear that he loves to play, as he actually says in “Ode to Nothing Time”:
“I’m not going to lie, / basically I / just like / playing.”
There is, however, another side to these poems: between some of the wittier ones—and sometimes within them—death makes random cameo appearances, as is his wont. We find this, for example, in “Nothing Is Normal These Days”:
“everybody travels so fast / they don’t get a chance to slow down - / no one wants to talk / about death.”
But even when death does appear, one senses that Wortsman is still at play, as if to defy it.
Given its beginning, “Nocturne” feels as if it may have been borrowed from some holy writ: “O shepherd of / dreams, / wanderer of the night...” That feeling continues to the end of the poem.
Some of these poems have a scientific, even philosophical bent, as do the final lines of “Taking a Word for a Walk”:
“It would be meaningless for an animal / to produce a frequency that can’t be heard.”
The thing I love most about this collection is the feeling of randomness that happens to make sense. The way life does...on occasion.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews