& - Pierre Antoine Zahnd
The ‘surrealist question game’, a close relative of Exquisite Corpse, was first played by the Paris-based Surrealists in the 1920s. It operates by divorcing the two terms of questions such as we conventionally understand them: each player writes a question on a piece of scrap paper, folds it over, swaps it for another from the common pile, and writes down an answer without having read the question. The combinations are then read aloud in a circle.
The game hinders the standard teleology of question asking (I have a goal and I angle my question or successive questions so as to get there), and makes irrelevant any attempt to give the answer a direction. Ultimately, the players ask and respond at, not to. The concept of authorship itself is removed (which often alleviates the stress of ‘making it a good one’): each couplet swaps the primacy of happenstance for that of individual volition.
Although the ‘dissociative method’ of the Surrealists was primarily meant to exemplify how wobbly our semantic ground is, the game also brings us to make sense of this dissociation. Couplets are generally more affecting than the sum of their parts: taken together they stimulate our capacity for context and inference, mental association, fragmented narrative, drama— and, sometimes, our feel for the poetic. It is all the more intriguing that this poetry exists quite comfortably without an author.
The following were sampled from two recent sessions. On one of those occasions one player did the edgiest thing and deepened the crack into the Semantic by eating the Q&A paper without even reading it. We wrote to André Breton
&
Are you asking?
15 times
Is the sun sweet?
I lost my mind
What do you do when I’m sleeping?
A trout
Describe Ted Hughes’ favourite coat
Life isn’t free
What did you tell her?
Bad friends
Why do blue and yellow make green?
I will never know what I mean
People stop writing poetry when…
Second-hand shoes
What if this glass of wine were your last?
Pumpkin
What does it take to be an arsonist?
Black soot
Do you sleep with the light on?
Sometimes camels do
How many times have you cut your hair?
Same same but different
How do you kill a caterpillar?
People don’t forgive easily
What will be the first line of your wedding vows?
When you absolutely have to
When I woke up she’d written on my chest:
Great idea for your next tattoo
If this pen were a woman she would weep only when…
Most of her answers sound the same
I never excelled at cunnilingus because…
I’ve read the question
Why did you swear for the first time?
Swans are dangerous
Where is it though?
I lost your left shoe
Describe Sylvia Plath’s hair
Sometimes
What does ‘empty’ mean to you?
I don’t give a shit about your reasons
My suitcases are always full of…
All the things!
I only ever have fun on cocaine when…
It doesn’t sound that way to me
Are we axiomatically tangible?
I don’t think of you
The ‘surrealist question game’, a close relative of Exquisite Corpse, was first played by the Paris-based Surrealists in the 1920s. It operates by divorcing the two terms of questions such as we conventionally understand them: each player writes a question on a piece of scrap paper, folds it over, swaps it for another from the common pile, and writes down an answer without having read the question. The combinations are then read aloud in a circle.
The game hinders the standard teleology of question asking (I have a goal and I angle my question or successive questions so as to get there), and makes irrelevant any attempt to give the answer a direction. Ultimately, the players ask and respond at, not to. The concept of authorship itself is removed (which often alleviates the stress of ‘making it a good one’): each couplet swaps the primacy of happenstance for that of individual volition.
Although the ‘dissociative method’ of the Surrealists was primarily meant to exemplify how wobbly our semantic ground is, the game also brings us to make sense of this dissociation. Couplets are generally more affecting than the sum of their parts: taken together they stimulate our capacity for context and inference, mental association, fragmented narrative, drama— and, sometimes, our feel for the poetic. It is all the more intriguing that this poetry exists quite comfortably without an author.
The following were sampled from two recent sessions. On one of those occasions one player did the edgiest thing and deepened the crack into the Semantic by eating the Q&A paper without even reading it. We wrote to André Breton
&
Are you asking?
15 times
Is the sun sweet?
I lost my mind
What do you do when I’m sleeping?
A trout
Describe Ted Hughes’ favourite coat
Life isn’t free
What did you tell her?
Bad friends
Why do blue and yellow make green?
I will never know what I mean
People stop writing poetry when…
Second-hand shoes
What if this glass of wine were your last?
Pumpkin
What does it take to be an arsonist?
Black soot
Do you sleep with the light on?
Sometimes camels do
How many times have you cut your hair?
Same same but different
How do you kill a caterpillar?
People don’t forgive easily
What will be the first line of your wedding vows?
When you absolutely have to
When I woke up she’d written on my chest:
Great idea for your next tattoo
If this pen were a woman she would weep only when…
Most of her answers sound the same
I never excelled at cunnilingus because…
I’ve read the question
Why did you swear for the first time?
Swans are dangerous
Where is it though?
I lost your left shoe
Describe Sylvia Plath’s hair
Sometimes
What does ‘empty’ mean to you?
I don’t give a shit about your reasons
My suitcases are always full of…
All the things!
I only ever have fun on cocaine when…
It doesn’t sound that way to me
Are we axiomatically tangible?
I don’t think of you