Cutting Up Kubla Khan
Thinking about the link between baseball and poetry a couple of weeks ago as we neared the end of this year’s baseball season, I was reminded of a performance poem in which the sport and the art quite are mashed together in spectacular fashion, Whitman McGowan’s cut-up “Kubla at the Bat.” Like a cento, this is a piece stitched together from others’ words, following in the line of the Surrealist cut-up method used by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. It’s actually quite amazing how the cadences of these two particular poems, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Ernest L. Thayer’s classic “Casey at the Bat,” combine and interact in the cut-up version — read it aloud and hear for yourself!
Then came notice of The Guardian’s poetry workshop topic for this month: readers’ attempts to complete, or at least continue, Coleridge’s masterpiece, collected and analyzed by Fred Daguiar. What would you make of the magnificent fragment Coleridge has left us in “Kubla Khan”?
Another kind of cut-up:
Bob Holman’s SemiCento
More on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Kubla Khan:
Dreaming of Xanadu: A Guide to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”
Profile of Gothic/Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Library of poems by Coleridge
Comments
I enjoyed the Kubla Khan at the bat.
I did a cut up sort of on Psalm 137 that I sent to my pals in Valdosta where we used to live. Everyweek during football season we would get together with these folks to watch the green bay packers. I hate football and sports but liked the fellowship and the drinking–everybody drank coors silver bullet as a sort of communion offering to the Packer Gods. Anyway, I wrote the following using pieces of the psalm (my favorite by the way)
Psalm 4 — Exiles’ Lamentation
1
By the River Dan in Virginia
we sat down and wept
when we remembered Green Bay
and those in Valdosta who love it.
2
There on the sad goal posts
Of Dan City Park we hung our harps,
3
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing about the Silver Bullet!”
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Farve!”
4
How could we sing the songs of the LORD
while cast out and downcast and down on our luck
in Danville, Virginia?
5
If I forget you, O Green Bay
and James and Susan and Marty
and Michael and Nancy and Donna
and Wes and Mouyyed and Susan
and Kate and Paul and Chris
and Tracy and Dick and Debi
and Sheri and Jane and Cathy
and Blake and Barb and Jeff and
forever faithful Brian Ward
may my right hand forget its skill,
my left hand forget how to shuffle.
6
May my tongue cling
to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Sunday Football
at James’s my highest joy.
7
Remember, O LORD, what the New Yorkers did
on the day Green Bay fell.
“Tear it down,” they cried,
“tear it down to its foundations!”
8
O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you
for what you have done to us–
9
happy is he who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.