group. The teaching staff is composed almost solely of New York
émigrés, smart, thuggish, movie-mad, trivia-crazed. They are here
to decipher the natural language of the culture, to make a formal
method of the shiny pleasures they’d known in their Europe-
shadowed childhoods—an Aristotelianism of bubble gum wrappers
and detergent jingles. The department head is Alfonse (Fast Food)
Stompanato, a broad-chested glowering man whose collection of
prewar soda pop bottles is on permanent display in an alcove.All his
teachers are male, wear rumpled clothes, need haircuts, cough into
their armpits.Together they look like teamster officials assembled to
identify the body of a mutilated colleague. The impression is one of
pervasive bitterness, suspicion and intrigue.From White Noise (DeLillo 1986, p. 9)This passage is characterised by exaggeration, ‘The teaching staff is com-
posed almost solely of New York émigrés, smart, thuggish, movie-mad,
trivia-crazed’; incongruity, ‘an Aristotelianism of bubble gum wrappers’;
and caricature, ‘All his teachers are male, wear rumpled clothes, need hair-
cuts, cough into their armpits’. It satirises universities, implying that some
academics make a living by turning the popular culture they enjoy into an
elitist academic discipline. The passage partly relies on ‘types’ to create a
certain effect. Overall it deflates academic pomposity, since academics are
shown up to be very conformist.
WHEN PROSE TURNS TO POETRY
In the second half of this chapter, which focuses on Exercise 3, we will
experiment with different aspects of poetry so that you can create a short
poem. There are countless types of poem, and any writer will employ some
tactics at the expense of others. The language-based strategies in the first
chapter (word association, phrase permutation and word pools) can help
you to build poems. In this section I am going to explore a few more poetic
techniques, but they are still only a fraction of the alternatives available. In
your poem you are not expected to experiment with all the possibilities—
just some of them. You may want to combine some of these techniques
with others from the first chapter.
In order to analyse some of the strategies, I will look at all the different
operations we can perform on a sentence to turn it into a poem. The poem
‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ by American poet William Carlos Williams is
made out of a single sentence. It becomes a poem, rather than a sentence,
Genre as a moveable feast 37