Exploring Experimental Forms
Some Key Techniques
Crots
Comparable to the stanza in poetry or the paragraph in traditional prose, crots may be brief and aphoristic (one or
two sentences) or rather extensive and developed (thirty sentences or more). Not bound to surrounding content
by traditional transitions, crots are fundamentally autonomous units, usually organized around a shared attitude
toward some common subject. Crots stand alone. Often writers use headings (short titles) to indicate change. For
instance, many writers write “crots” by year as a way to capture memory. A crot like this might begin: 2005. (The
the writer describes, in a specific and visual passage, a moment from 2005. This might be followed mby another
“crot” titles 2010. Then the writer explores a moment from 2010. This is a cool and engaging way to structure a
personal essay because crots don’t make explicit connections between segments of writing. This jarring effect
forces and stimulates the reader into actively supplying leaps of logic, inference, and connection.
Labyrinthine Sentences and Sentence Fragments
Labyrinthine sentences are very long, vivid and complex sentences that convey a certain “endless” quality. Full of
convolutions, these sentences are marked by appositives, parentheses, and digressions. Labyrinthine sentences
work to convey complexity, and confusion.
Just let the words flow on and on. Like this:
I can feel the sweat run down the small of my back at an agonizingly lazy pace as my muscles strain and
push me further on, farther on, longer and longer I run, counting the steps, even as my throat burns and
threat metallic taste like blood distracts me from the slight breeze that blows, that pushes my damp hair
from my forehead, feet pounding to the sounds of parents cheering (not mine, they never come) and I am
alone again despite the crowd, despite the vibrations of the other runners around me.
The challenge is to write a long, long sentence without getting any squiggly error lines! Hooray! I did it.
Sentences Fragments
Sentence fragments may be a single word or very short phrase of two or three words. Suggesting a sense of
isolation, sentence fragments tend to stand out as highly emphatic, particularly in mixed environments with
labyrinthine sentences.
Lists
A list is a textual series of items—objects, characteristics, observations, etc.—removed from full/formal sentence
structure. List items are equally related to some common subject matter; no other relation is explicitly suggested.
Lists create a quick idea of something—a place, person, situation, etc.—by presenting specific details without
offering interpretation of those details. By presenting raw content without commentary, lists force the reader to
interpret and evaluate the significance of the content.
Just write lists of details and concrete things that capture the raw content. You can write your list as a line or as a
descending series of words. However you want your list to look and feel.
Double-Voice
Double-voice refers to the representation of multiple “narrators,” speakers, or perspectives within a single text.
For example, double-voice can be achieved through question/answer sequences, the use of bold/italic/underline
typeface, or the division of text into columns. Double-voice is useful for presenting “both sides” of a story, when
the writer wants to occupy different roles within a composition, or when discursive ambiguities can be clarified
through the presentation of multiple, conflicted voices. As the relationship between voices is seldom made
explicit, double-voice requires that the reader forge a connection between conflicting textual perspectives.
This is a really cool technique to capture two differing perspectives of two different people – or to capture the
complex ways we “double-voice” in our heads all the time when thinking.
Repetitions/Refrains
The repetition of words, phrases, sentences, and entire crots creates a kind of momentum or energy, helping a
composition cohere in the absence of traditional transition devices. Although repetition can—and should—create
intensity, its primary role is to counterbalance the disjoint, fragmentation, and discontinuity of alternative forms
of writing by using repetition or refrain as an organizing device.
Language Variegation
Language variegation refers to the manipulation of standard spelling and the use of foreign words or phrases.
Creating a unique texture, language variegation can be subtle and delicate or pervasive and extreme as it pushes
the limits of standard vocabulary and word forms. Language variegation may signal a stance of “fun and play,”
communicate a certain unorthodoxy, or seek a more apt representation of a subject than is possible with standard
words. By violating expectations of standard word forms, language variegation asks readers to grapple with the
significance of altered forms.
A Short Grammar B Essay on William Blake’s “The Tyger”
Blake’s “The Tyger” (1794). Poem. What are its sources? Some real tiger in the zoo? George Stubb’s animal
drawings? Medieval bestiaries? Some psychological beast within? There are no definite answers. Never will be.
Perhaps man is a zoo and within the zoo are these animals of the mind. Later in Blake there are four animals. Add a
wolf. Add a lion. That’s all rather dark, isn’t it?
Here, at the beginning, in Songs of Innocence and of Experience there are two.
Lamb
Gentleness
Sacrifice
Receptivity
Innocence
Child
Tyger
Anger
Authority
Aggression
Experience
Adult
Yet all is God: God is the mind of man: God is the full range of man’s mind: God is the lamb and the Tyger.
So Blake asks the question: Why both things? Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Thus God makes himself: he makes himself in two parts (later in four parts) and Blake ponders the question why is
it that way?
Simple
words
that
everyone
Complex locutions that present us with semantic puzzles
(riddles/enigmas) which even
though emanating from man’s
can
read
and
understand
mind defy man’s mind goading
words into their own logomachia,
armies of abstractions: confounding, obscuring, confusing . . .
Words that take arms against a
Sea. . .
So Blake writes down the question, showing the two contrary states of the human soul. His poem is full of the
tygrrrrrrrrr.
There are no answers.
Blake draws a pussycat and paints it with stripes and puts a grin on its face. Is Blake amused?
Is God amused? Is it all a cosmic joke?
That is another question altogether/entirely. Just as no one knows where the tiger came from. One question leads to
another. That’s what “The Tyger” is all about: the generation of unanswerable questions: the texture and tapestry
of the human experience.