“I’m a Novelist Rather than a Poet”: William S. Burroughs’ Radical Prose-Poetics

By Benjamin J. Heal

Abstract

This article considers the poetic features of William Burroughs’ work through an examination of his more genre-defying publications, beginning with Naked Lunch (1959) and continuing through the Cut-up trilogy (1961-68). Specifically, it will explore how Burroughs’ experiments employ radical prose-poetics to critique the conventional forms. Burroughs’ direct calls to action with texts such as Minutes to Go (1960) and Electronic Revolution (1970) can be seen to conflate radical poetic practice with political activism. Indeed, Burroughs’ conclusion that “All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard” (The Third Mind, 32), points to a practical conflation of different forms, practices and genres that connect the page with words heard in real-time. The rhythm, cadence and syntax of Burroughs’ cut-up works demonstrate that they do not employ an entirely aleatory practice, but are carefully arranged, deliberately poetic compositions. This examination of Burroughs’ poetic-prose and experimental practice aims to re-situate his works as examples of radical poetic practice rather than apolitical prose experiments.

Keywords
Prose-poetry, poetics, revolution, authorship theory, literary collage, Beat Generation

“I’m a Novelist Rather than a Poet”: William S. Burroughs’ Radical Prose-Poetics.

In a 1978 interview, Burroughs claimed Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and St John Perse as primary influences, acknowledging their impact on the “poetic or image sections” of his work (Lotringer, 441). This statement contrasts with his self-identification as a novelist, highlighting a tension that Allen Ginsberg addressed in 1966, stating that Burroughs’ prose is “as dense with imagery” as any poet (Paris Review, 320). This article challenges the view that William S. Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique is a form of radical, destructive, and negative poetics. Instead, it argues that Burroughs employs surprisingly traditional poetic techniques, and uses cut-ups to disrupt the traditional boundaries between prose and poetry to advance his more radical political agenda.

Naked Lunch (1959) largely rejects traditional narrative structure. The ensuing cut-up technique, drawn from Brion Gysin’s rediscovery of Dadaist methods, further pushes this experimental approach by rearranging existing text into new compositions (Miles, 362).In a 1960 letter to Ginsberg Burroughs stresses the specifically poetic nature of his cut-up experiments, imploring Ginsberg to try it, stating that it produces “poetic prose image writing like Rimbaud, St. Perse and Your Correspondent”. A comparison of Perse’s Anabasis with Naked Lunch reveals stylistic similarities:

Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams (Naked Lunch, 148-149)

Men, creatures of dust and folk of divers devices, people of business and of leisure, men from the marches and those from beyond, O men of little weight in the memory of these lands; people from the valleys and the uplands and the highest slopes of the world to the ultimate reach of our shores; Seers of signs and seeds, and confessors of the western winds, followers of trails and of seasons, breakers of camp in the little dawn wind, seekers of watercourses over the wrinkled rind of the world, O seekers, O finders of reasons to be up and be gone. (Anabasis, 27-29)

Both sections use a second-person, prose-poetic style, with no formal structure. They are image-rich and have an incantatory chant-like rhythm giving them a magical or sermon-like religious quality. In the preface of Anabasis, T.S. Eliot (the text’s translator) wrestles with the issue at hand: ‘[…] Anabasis is poetry. Its sequences, its logic of imagery, are those of poetry and not of prose […] the system of stresses and pauses […] is that of poetry and not prose.’ (11). He is unequivocal about it being poetry. It seems odd that he does not consider the third option, prose-poetry, a blend of the two forms. A kind of genre confusion is present in critical accounts of Burroughs’ work too.

Oliver Harris, drawing on Ginsberg’s assertion that “Burroughs is a poet too,” highlights the presence of prose-poetry in Burroughs’ work as early as the “Composite City” section of The Yage Letters (1963). Harris observes that this section, reminiscent of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and Perse’s Anabasis, “recycles and transforms” earlier material from Burroughs’ own writing, creating a phantasmagoria fuelled by yagé intoxication (Harris, “Burroughs Is a Poet Too Really”). While Harris identifies poetic qualities in Burroughs’ work, he stops short of explicitly labeling “Composite City” as poetry or prose-poetry. This omission is also evident in his introduction to The Yage Letters: Redux (2006), where he describes the book as a “work of intriguing genre confusion,” listing various genres but excluding poetry. However, by acknowledging this “genre confusion,” Harris implicitly recognizes Burroughs’ intention to disrupt traditional genre boundaries. For Burroughs this is not a literary revolution akin to Walt Whitman’s explicit free verse attack on form and content, but rather a more covert approach, in the shadows exposé of the pervasive and controlling nature of literary traditions, even within the context of the mid-twentieth-century avant-garde literary scene.

The “Composite City” section of The Yage Letters, initially a passage from a 1953 letter, first appeared in the 1957 issue of the Black Mountain Review.[1] Although presented as an excerpt from the then-unpublished Naked Lunch, this poetic passage, collected by Ginsberg for editor Robert Creeley, did not appear in its original context within The Yage Letters until 1975. This delay stemmed from its incorporation into Naked Lunch and its subsequent repetition throughout the Cut-up trilogy.[2] This early publication in a poetry magazine, coupled with its adaptation for Naked Lunch, highlights the fluidity of Burroughs’ writing and its transgression of genre boundaries. Furthermore, it underscores the significance of “Composite City” as a key textual element in Burroughs’ evolving oeuvre, as explored by Oliver Harris in “Not Burroughs’ Final Fix” (2006).

During the 1965 obscenity trial of Naked Lunch in Boston, Ginsberg testified that the book contained “pure language and pure poetry” comparable to the best American writing (Murphy, “Intersection Points,” 96). While Ginsberg’s notion of “pure” remains ambiguous, his defense highlights the text’s resistance to easy categorization. This difficulty in defining Naked Lunch aligns with Charles Bernstein’s definition of poetry as writing that demands “proactive” reading (9). Burroughs’ work, particularly Naked Lunch and the Cut-up texts, embodies this definition by challenging readers to decipher its complex array of genres and techniques, even encouraging them to engage with the cut-up method itself.

Although verse novels exist and are classified as such, such as Vladimir Nabakov’s Pale Fire (1962), Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate (1986), and Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990), Naked Lunch and the Cut-up trilogy include prose narrative and poetic sections, yet remain defined as novels. Mikhail Bakhtin’s attempts to conceptualize and define the novel as distinct from the dialogic and heteroglot limitations of poetry describe a form with the necessary generic fluidity to incorporate innovative poetic language as part of its “spirit of becoming and unfinalizability” (Dialogic Imagination, 7). In his apparently narrow conceptualization, poetry emerged as a more single-voiced, monologic form, with the poet, “utterly immersed in [his own language] as a pure and direct expression of his own intention” (285). Indeed, Bakhtin’s conception of heteroglossia in the novel, as instances that reveal the differences in “social dialects” present in the modern novel such as the blending and parodying of genres, and the incorporation of poetic forms, can be seen in the content of Naked Lunch and the Cut-up trilogy.[3] For example, Naked Lunch, begins with a parody of the hard-boiled detective genre, “I can feel the heat closing in” (3), yet the “Do You Love Me?” section of The Ticket that Exploded intersperses and cuts between numerous lyrics taken verbatim from popular love songs, again blurring the genres with experiments in poetic form (48-55).

Is it more accurate, then, to describe William Burroughs’ work—beginning with Naked Lunch—as “prose-poetry”? In an interview with Philippe Mikriammos, Burroughs argues that once one moves beyond conventional poetic forms like rhyme and meter, the distinction between prose and poetry disappears. He explains. “I can take a page of descriptive prose and break it into lines, as I’ve done in Exterminator!, and then you’ve got a poem. Call it a poem.” (16). This perspective challenges the traditional view of poetry and prose as distinct, oppositional genres. As Stephen Fredman notes, we typically see poetry as concise, transcendent, and essential, while prose is considered more descriptive and mundane (2). However, as Andrew Bennett observes, these categories often follow a false logic of “either/or,” when a more productive approach might be “both/and” (32). Is this rigid thinking the reason Burroughs’ texts are not widely regarded as prose-poetry?

Burroughs was keenly aware of the limitations of binary logic, drawing on the non-Aristotelian principles of Count Alfred Korzybski. In The Job (1984), he critiques the “either/or” thinking that polarizes concepts like right/wrong or true/false: “The whole concept of OR will be deleted from the language and replaced by juxtaposition, by and” (200). This rejection of binary oppositions parallels Burroughs’ literary practice, where language itself becomes fragmented and recombined, resisting easy genre categorization.

Fredman’s definition of prose-poetry underscores this point, “[Prose-poetry texts] evidence a fascination with language—through puns, rhyme, repetition, disjunction, and excessive troping—that disrupts narrative progression while engaging with the ‘prose’ realms of fact and anecdote.” (1) [4] This aligns with the French Symbolists’ concept of the prose poem, as articulated by Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. For these poets, prose offered a way to break free from the rigid structures of traditional poetry. Baudelaire described the prose poem as a form that could express “the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience” without the constraints of rhythm and rhyme (1970, ix-x). While it is unclear how prose can be “musical” without these elements, Baudelaire’s definition reflects his desire to erase the boundary between prose and poetry.

This subversive impulse influenced Burroughs, who was drawn to Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen (1869), a collection of prose poems that challenged established poetic forms. As Burroughs recalls in The Adding Machine (1985), he was captivated by such works during his youth: “I liked to get in my room against the radiator, play records, and read the Little Blue Books put out by Haldeman-Julius… Baudelaire…” (53.9/493). The Baudelaire book is the ‘Little Blue Book number 237,’ Poems in Prose, also known as Paris Spleen. This reference to Baudelaire’s Poems in Prose suggests that Burroughs was deeply engaged with the tension between poetry and prose, a concern that would shape his own experimental approach to language.

Whitman was another largely subversive influence on the other Beats, particularly in terms of his spontaneous and free-form poetics. Yet as Matt Miller points out, a different Whitman appears to have been doing the unacknowledged groundwork for Burroughs, “the conceptual Whitman, with his critique of originality, his groundbreaking use of literary self-collage, and his spinal ideas holding the fragments together” (122). For Miller, Whitman saw language in material terms, whereby he could “manipulate and restructure it in radical, even violent ways.” (123). Certainly, the materiality of the cut-ups is a continuation of Whitman’s manipulation of language, though Burroughs’ incorporation of such a poetics into novel-like prose forms is innovative, and brings together Whitman’s collage fragments with Baudelaire’s prose-poetic style. Although some critics, such as Veronique Lane, argue that Burroughs does not directly engage with Le Spleen de Paris, the influence of Baudelaire’s prose-poetic style on Burroughs’ work is unmistakable. Both writers are united by their rejection of genre boundaries and their use of fragmented, often disjointed language to explore the complexities of the human experience. Thus, Burroughs’ texts can be seen as part of a broader literary tradition that resists neat categorization and questions the nature of what constitutes poetry and prose.

Burroughs’ Poetic Language: Subverting Form and Genre

While Burroughs’ collaborative, aleatory, and plagiaristic writing practices challenge traditional notions of authorship, his radical approach extends beyond mere experimentation to a profound subversion of both literary and social conventions.[5] Burroughs’ radical approach appears to push for revolution, in the sense of producing profound changes in politics, literary and social conventions. The thematic violence and transgression mirrored by the textual violence that are central features of the fragmented cut-up texts bring to mind Theodore Adorno’s provocative statement that “[T]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (202), interpreted by Antony Rowland as the description of a “new form of poetry which is stylistically […] awkward. The language is necessarily unstable because it engages with the embarrassing struggle […] to forge a language adequate to represent the horror of the holocaust” (58). Adorno’s statement is apt concerning Burroughs’ political satires such as “Roosevelt After Inauguration”, and the structurally ‘barbaric’ collage and cut-up texts that attack the conventions of prose narrative and authorship by attacking what he sees as the unstable foundations of language. For Adorno, post-war art could no longer be seen as ‘purely aesthetic and apolitical’, and needed to assert its autonomy to survive: “This is not a time for political art, but politics has migrated into autonomous art, and nowhere more so than where it seems to be politically dead” (202). This consideration of ‘autonomous’ art suggests political aspects of Western modernist, abstract avant-garde works in the 1950s and 60s became less overt, with increasing experimentation with formal and stylistic elements in works that eschew simple interpretation, with ideas hidden within or embodied by the formal experimentation itself. Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero (1953) makes a similar distinction in his response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s contention that the social realist form of committed prose writing is committed precisely because it utilizes conventional literary tropes that are bonded to a ‘pre-ordained state of language’. (79) For Barthes, there is no such state, arguing instead that ‘colorless’ writing [écriture blanche], in the context of experimental writing more generally, can be more politically engaged than the didactic or realist prose styles Sartre champions, precisely because of the challenging stylistic choices made (82).

Burroughs’ cut-up texts embody this idea of the ‘colorless’, experimental text, subverting the traditional concept of the literary “work”. Burroughs’ texts, with their fragmented and plagiarized elements, become sites of “productive violence” (Kristeva, 30), disrupting established discourses and prompting readers to question the nature of authorship and meaning. Kristeva further explores the structure of such discourses, defining them in psychoanalytic terms:

If there exists a “discourse” that is […] the essential element of a practice involving the sum of unconscious, subjective, and social relations in gestures of confrontation and appropriation, destruction and construction—productive violence, in short—it is “literature,” or, more specifically, the text. (30)

Central to her perspective is the relation between reader and writer, and what she terms “a particular type of modern literature”, citing as examples works by Comte de Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Joyce, and Antonin Artaud, that highlight a ‘“crisis” of structuralist criticism and their ideological, coercive and necrophilic manifestations’ (15). The work of these writers can also be regarded as part of Burroughs’ poetic genealogy, from the prose-poetry and violent surrealism of Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) to the formal complexity of Mallarmé and Joyce, and Artaud’s radical sound poetry.[6] The cut-up technique can be seen as an example of what Kristeva calls ‘productive violence’, which links the discussion of art and poetic language in directions that converge with Burroughs’ experiments in form and genre. Via their plagiaristic theft of other writers’ words, cut-up texts invoke questions of “intertextuality”, a term first coined by Kristeva and defined as the “transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another” (59-60). This is broader than Roland Barthes’ later assertion of intertext as “citations, references, echoes, cultural languages…in a vast stereophony” (160). The definition of Kristeva’s intertextuality as ‘transposition’, a movement between points, can be applied to Burroughs’ assertion in Naked Lunch that “this book spill off the page in all directions” (191), through to the physical act of cutting text, the later spoken word recordings and performances of his text, and ultimately his attempts to distort definitions of poetry and prose.

Burroughs’ use of the em dash and ellipses, sites of violent rupture and suspension in the text, also highlights the rhythmic and temporal aspects of his writing. As Nowell Smith notes, such punctuation marks signify breath and draw attention to the prosodic aspects of the text: “It is this experience of lyric time that demands a turning of our breath – a turn, moreover, registered physically, and prosodically, as Atempause, ‘breathpause’ (or, in Waldrop’s translation, ‘pause for breath’, 48), cutting into silence, cutting silence” (263.3 / 552). Echoing Ginsberg’s experiments with the ‘breath-unit’ and what Tony Trigilio calls his “mantric poetics’, Burroughs’ use of breath is a physical response, a visible pause often interpreted as silence or simply ignored in reading (189). Yet these pauses are central to the rhythmic quality of the texts, as can be seen in the cut-up “Mao Tze: Ta Ta Kan Kan….Kan Kan Ta Ta…(fight fight talk talk…talk talk fight fight)”. From the ninth line the text features ellipsis and repetition, which give the text a rhythmic sound quality that can be overlooked when simply scanning the page:

Dim vest of….terminal electric voice of C…. All Ling
out of agitated….terminal electric voice of C…all ling out
of agitated…terminal electric voice of C….all ling out of
Agitated…terminal electric voice of C…… (Minutes to Go, 20).

The text is presented as a cut-up of a Sinclair Beiles poem ‘Stalin’. A close reading can offer multiple interpretations, for example, the ‘dim vest’ can be seen as both the standardization inherent in communism and the suicide vest of resistance, the terminal electric voice the robotic communication of drone-like communists or the coded messages of resistance. The ‘C’, literally floating before an ellipsis, can be the ‘C’ of communism, capitalism or cocaine, which is referred to as “C” in Junkie. It can also be ‘sea’ or ‘see’. The ‘C’ can be stretched across the ellipsis of breath, or perhaps border, to ‘Calling out of agitated’, a call for agitation or a calling out of those who are agitating.

These pauses contribute to the prosody of his work, creating a performative dimension that destabilizes the relationship between body and speech, as noted by Nowell Smith (316.1 / 552). This performative aspect is further emphasized by Joan Didion’s observation that Burroughs’ writing is more of a ‘sound’ than traditional prose (30). This “sound,” infused with cultural fragments and clichés, carries a radical political impetus. Burroughs himself acknowledges the importance of sound, stating that “what we see is determined to a large extent by what we hear” (“Invisible Generation,” 6).

Ultimately, Burroughs’ poetic language, with its fragmented forms, intertextual references, and rhythmic disruptions, embodies Kristeva’s notion of art as an expression of the inexpressible. (Bedient, 807).  By subverting the logical structure of language, his work allows for the emergence of the semiotic – the tone, gesture, and rhythm of words – encouraging readers to actively engage with the non-explicit dimensions of meaning. In this way, Burroughs’ poetic experiments become a form of social revolution, challenging conventional modes of thought and expression.

Burroughs’ Poetic Resistance: Sound, Vision, and the Cut-Up

So how does one make the case for Burroughs’ poetics of resistance? Naked Lunch, with its incongruous and metaphorical title, is a good place to start with its cornucopia of poetic images, use of alliteration, and prosodic rhythms. Short and often surreal phrases and images appear throughout the text, breaking any semblance of a purely prose narrative, as this section of “The Rube” shows: “Chicago: invisible hierarchy of decorticated wops, smell of atrophied gangsters, earthbound ghost hits you at North and Halsted, Cicero, Lincoln Park, panhandler of dreams, past invading the present, rancid magic of slot machines and roadhouses” (11). When there is a section of sustained genre narrative, as in the “Hauser and O’Brien” and “The Examination” sections, the language tends to break down: ‘A moment of static, dangling wires, broken connections . . .“Nobody of that name in this department . . . Who are you?”’ (181). The subtle juxtaposition between the realist narrative of the junky protagonist William Lee having his identity questioned while attempting to ascertain the veracity of the events described earlier with the staccato poetry of the line, “A moment of static, dangling wires, broken connections”, demonstrates Burroughs’s stylistic shift: poetry is invading the novel.

The influence of Rimbaud also becomes overt in Naked Lunch, with “The Drunken Boat” serving as a template for sections of the “Atrophied Preface”:

Now I, William Seward, will unlock my word hoard . . . My
Viking heart fares over the great brown river where motors put
put in jungle twilight and whole trees float with huge snakes in
the branches (192)

Compare with this section from “The Drunken Boat”:

Now I, a boat lost in the hair of bays,
Hurled by the hurricane through bird-less ether,
I, whose carcass, sodden with salt-sea water,
No Monitor or Hanseatic vessel could recover. (67)

As evidenced here, Rimbaud’s rhythmic prose-poem experiments in Illuminations, a book noted by Barry Miles as one of Burroughs’ favorites, are clearly echoed in Naked Lunch. Rimbaud’s continuing importance would reappear in Minutes to Go (1960). (Miles, 571).

Further evidence of the poetic credentials of Naked Lunch can be seen through its unconstrained musicality, a trait that bears direct comparison with Ginsberg’s “Howl”. Indeed, in Howard Brookner’s 1983 film Burroughs: The Movie, Ginsberg mentions the poetic nature of this particular section of Naked Lunch:

Over the broken chair and out through the tool-house window whitewash whipping in a cold spring wind on a limestone cliff over the river . . . piece of moon smoke hangs in china blue sky . . . out on a long line of jissom across the dusty floor . . . Motel . . . Motel . . . Motel . . . broken neon arabesque . . . loneliness moans across the continent like fog horns over still oily water of tidal rivers . . . Ball squeezed dry lemon rinderpest rims the ass with a knife cut off a piece of hash for the water pipe-bubble bubble-indicate what used to be me . . . (188)

The similarities with “Howl” are apparent, particularly where the “Motel” refrain recalls the “Moloch” anaphora “Howl”, while the long line cadences are strikingly similar, as can be seen in the following section:

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind (10)

Much of the imagery is shared; the moon appears in both pieces, as do drugs and genitalia, and the ‘neon arabesques’ of Burroughs’s piece echo Ginsberg’s ‘neon blinking traffic light’. It is as though Burroughs is constructing a parody of “Howl”. Murphy notes that these poetic sections act to glue disparate sections together, and are more “poetic or even musical than novelistic in that they operate through evocative, impressionistic, or imagistic intensity rather than logical or causal extension” (“Intersection Points”, 193). This approach is problematic in that there is a tendency to dismiss such sections as musical interludes between the main events (as Murphy does), rather than see them as centrally important ruptures in the text, examples of the subversion of literary conventions by using a remarkably conventional form, poetry.

The collaborative Minutes to Go (1960), which inaugurates the cut-up project, marks the centrality of poetry in Burroughs’s work, as it is a pointedly poetic collaboration between Burroughs, the artist Brion Gysin, and two poets; Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso, the latter definitively defining the cut-up as “uninspired machine poetry” in the final line of the book (63).  Burroughs explicitly labeled the text produced by the method “Newspeak poetry” in a 1959 letter to Allen Ginsberg, a reference to George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949) which makes abundantly clear the simultaneous political emphasis of the cut-up project (Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg, December 2, 1959 (Paul Carroll Papers, Box 2, Univer­sity of Chicago). Gysin notes the debt the method owes to Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, whose 1920’s “Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love” provides instructions on how to make a poem by randomly picking newspaper clippings from a hat. (4). The first contribution by Burroughs to appear in Minutes to Go, “Open Letter to Life Magazine,” stands in stark contrast to the formulaic journalism of its namesake. The poem’s fragmented syntax and rhythmic patterns create a sense of expressive wholeness, separating it from prose. Burroughs’s other cut-ups in this collection are visually striking, often presented in stanzas with fragmented syntax and rhythmic patterns. There are two cut-ups of Rimbaud, underlining the essentially poetic focus of the method, but moreover, the cut-up project further radicalized his poetic and political project, which as presented by a band around the outside of early editions was “un règlement de comptes avec la Littérature” [a settling of scores with literature].[7]  Furthermore, “Open Letter to Life Magazine”, has a title that references the freedom of form that Burroughs saw as possible with the cut-ups, giving a sense of freedom from its “open” designation, while the reference to and contrast with Life Magazine, with its non-fiction journalism, stands in clear juxtaposition with the poetic phantasmagoria presented by this first cut-up. It is marked by a rhythm that can be better seen if restructured into units as follows:

Sickle moon terror nails replica in tin ginsberg
Replicas of squaresville  –
grey piebald pigeons
pointedly questioned, mimic each other (11)

While it is difficult to know the semantic stress intended for each syllable, it can be analyzed as follows: The first line uses two anapaests, a tribrach, and two spondees; the second line has a tribrach followed by a molossus. The third line has a dactyl followed by an iamb. The final line uses a tribrach, a trochee, an anapest, and an iamb. All of which appears random, but the overall arrangement of broken syntax punctuated by em dashes, and the use of repetition (replica/replicas, and the repeated anapests) gives each unit of rhythm a sense of expressive wholeness, which separates it from prose writing. In essence, these lines look and sound like poetry. It also works in terms of poetic imagery: a Gothic vision of “tin ginsberg[s]”, robotic squares lined up like pigeons, mimicking each other. This is the vision of America the Beat writers were rebelling against –unsurprising given this is a cut-up of Paul O’Neil’s 1959 Life Magazine article attacking the Beats – but its metaphorical and poetic quality does not point to random assembly or prose writing. In this first publication after Naked Lunch, Burroughs is clearly experimenting with poetry.

The trilogy of cut-up novels served to further the poetic and prosodic possibilities of the technique. In his introduction to Nova Express (1964), Harris reinforces its poetic qualities by identifying one of its many voices as ‘the convulsive beauty of a surrealist poet’. (10.5 / 433). In highlighting the heteroglot nature of the text, Harris alludes to Bakhtin’s insistence on the importance of the ‘architectonic form’ of the text, that is the “linkage of concrete, singular parts and aspects into a finished whole” (Morson & Emerson, 139). In Burroughs’ heteroglossia, there is an interplay between both the architectonic (understandable, ‘concrete’ narrative and dialogue that gives the whole its structure) and the more prosaic sections of abstract image poetry. Seeing the text from this perspective one can begin to see the radical potential of its poetics at work; Nova Express is not a novel nor a work of poetry, rather it fits ambivalently in between, with its many voices subverting any attempts to fix its genre in traditional forms, with even the basic structure subject to cutting and montage. Underscoring this, the opening of Nova Express is a prose poem demanding the reader to “listen to my last words,” exposing the power structures that control language and reality. The repetitive, rhythmic syntax creates an incantatory effect:

Listen to my last words anywhere. Listen to my last words any world. Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn feet forever—
“Don’t let them see us. Don’t tell them what we are doing—”
Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of the earth?
“For God’s sake don’t let that Coca-Cola thing out—”
“Not The Cancer Deal with The Venusians—”
“Not The Green Deal—Don’t show them that—”
“Not The Orgasm Death—”
“Not the ovens—”
Listen: I call you all. Show your cards all players. Pay it all pay it all pay it all back. Play it all play it all play it all back. For all to see. In Times Square. In Piccadilly. […] (80.0/433)

Click here for Burroughs reading a version of “The Last Words of Hassan Sabbah” from the 1981 album Nothing Here Now But The Recordings : https://youtu.be/fGJ7Z6AEzpY?si=RphfNx_ssCUVKKW9

The demand for the reader to “listen” to the text highlights its prosodic structure of the text, with syntax that is both rhythmic and resistant to standard poetic form. For example, “pay it all pay it all pay it all back” acts as an anaphoric curse or howl in the mode of Ginsberg that breaks the flow of the text. This Whitmanesque use of anaphora with the repetitive, rhythmic use of the words “listen” (4 times), “not” (4 times), and “all” (9 times), gives the text the coercive or rhetorical power of an incantation or sermon. Its second-person perspective also gives it a sense of writing designed to be read out loud. Indeed, it was initially rehearsed in a slightly different form on a recording made earlier than the 1964 publication (Burroughs 1981). The importance of intonation can be detected on the recording, demonstrating that it was rehearsed out loud for its phonetic qualities. As Valentin Voloshinov states, “[intonation] lies on the boundary between the verbal and the non-verbal, the spoken and the unspoken” (69) and, crucially, has a “dual social orientation” (72), towards the listener. The listener relates to the speaker as a member of a social class, through a series of unspoken social evaluations. It is this aspect of Burroughs’ poetics, the concern for the intonation of each line, that demonstrates to the reader is vitally important, as they are embedded in the architectonic structure of the text, that their interpretation of intonation is part of the means to extract meaning.

This is all part of Burroughs’s stated aim for the cut-up texts, that they should disrupt the “reality film,” the constructed version of reality propagated by those in power. He employs the cut-up technique to resist this dominant narrative, recognizing the physicality of discourse and its potential for social change. To do so Burroughs resorts not to subtlety, familiar forms and genres, or direct, didactic philosophizing, but rather a prose-poetic mix, or “shuffle cut” that has at its center a need to connect with the reader, for the words to have power, meaning and above all, be memorable (The Ticket That Exploded, 172).[8]

The Poetics of Disruption: Sound, Noise, and Control in Burroughs’ Work

Burroughs’s interest in repetition and prosody can be seen as part of his broader search for methods to influence and control his audience. He sought to harness the power of poetry, a more memorable form, to achieve this goal.[9]  In Naked Lunch, Benway’s voice is described in hypnotic terms as, “drifting into consciousness… like music down a windy street” (25). This hypnotic potential of language, particularly when performed aloud, is explored in Edward D. Snyder’s 1930 study Hypnotic Poetry. Snyder suggests that certain poetic techniques can induce trance-like states in listeners, highlighting the importance of performance in achieving these effects. (15).

This performative aspect is central to Burroughs’s cut-up practice, which extended beyond textuality into film, recordings, and live events. His participation in the 1962 Paris performance “La Bohème,” which involved reading poems off shuffled cards with taped sound accompaniment, exemplifies this transmedial approach. (Miles 1077.5 / 827).   Similarly, the release of a cut-up recording of Burroughs’s 1965 reading at the East End Theatre in New York by French Sound poet Henri Chopin further demonstrates a wider recognition of his work as poetry by poets. Moreover, Burroughs himself acknowledges the musicality of the cut-up method, comparing it to the use of repetition and rearrangement in musical composition. He emphasizes the careful construction involved in creating these sonic experiences, stating, “[W]hat does a writer do but choose, edit and rearrange materials at his disposal?” (Burroughs Live, 58). This attention to prosody is evident in works like Nova Express, which were clearly intended to be heard. This interplay between transmission and reception in sonic terms aligns with Kristeva’s aforementioned concept of a revolutionary, intertextual poetics. Bernstein notes that the direct address employed by Burroughs, from the provocative lines in Naked Lunch to the opening of Nova Express, counters the “absorption” often produced by more traditional poetic forms (32). This use of direct address and prosodic tools creates a disconcerting textual dissonance and even repulsion in some readers. This aligns with composer Edgard Varèse’s contention:

[T]o stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has been called noise. But after all, what is music but organized noises. And a composer, like all artists, is an organizer of disparate elements. Subjectively, noise is any sound one doesn’t like. (207)

Burroughs’ approach to language and poetics is akin to Varèse’s: he is conditioning his readers to regard and understand his textual ‘noise’ as literature. A similar point is made by Michael Sean Bolton, who contends that readers of Burroughs’ work should develop an “associative method of interpretation”, and become “interactive collaborators, forming unique networks of meaning as they read.” (Mosaic of Juxtaposition, 37)

Even in his more apparently straightforward didactic works, Burroughs utilizes poetic techniques for disruptive purposes. Electronic Revolution (1970) embeds visual cues and a subliminal poem within the prose, creating textual dissonance as part of its revolutionary call to use tape recorders to resist ‘establishment mass media’. The theories expounded in Electronic Revolution include Burroughs’ postulation that the written word is a virus, and as such a word virus is ‘a very small unit of word and image’ (The Job, 14). Burroughs’ word viruses are tape recordings of speech and sound, cut and spliced to create dramatic effects. Therefore, Burroughs’ understanding of the word virus is as transmedial poetry, memorable sound poetry designed to achieve practical, political effects. An example of this in action occurs via the subliminal poem spliced into the more didactic text of Electronic Revolution. Words written in capitals become signs that symbolize a viral infection of the prose text, and if taken out of the body of text it becomes a politically powerful poem:

MY GOD THEY’RE KILLING US

BLOODY WEDNESDAY A DAZED AMERICA COUNTED 23 DEAD AND 32 WOUNDED, 6 CRITICALLY.

LET’S GET OURSELVES SOME CIVVIES

“HERE ME IS”

“THE SIXTH WILL PROBABLY BLOW YOUR HEAD OFF”

THIS IS IT

TO SURVIVE

END OF THE WAR GAME (The Job, 174-203)

There are clear poetic effects such as the enjambment between the second and third lines, which adds emphasis to the word “DEAD”, along with the syllabic similarity of the final lines. One can read it as a reflection on the figurative existence of the revolutionary writer, who is “WOUNDED […] CRITICALLY” by critics and reviewers and the need for camouflage (CIVVIES) to survive the “WAR GAME”, likely referencing Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of the language game, which Burroughs references in Naked Lunch, a point noted by R.G. Patterson in his article “A Picture Is a Fact: Wittgenstein and The Naked Lunch.”. The text describes using recordings to create specific subliminal effects, and the embedding of this poem is an attempt to create a subliminal effect within the text itself.

Burroughs’s use of ellipses, dashes, and capitalized words, while channeling Emily Dickinson and Whitman, also contributes to this textual noise, disrupting conventional reading patterns and challenging the reader’s expectations. This deliberate use of textual dissonance as a form of noise aligns with Attali’s observation that noise functions as “a force of interruption… that always takes aim at the social order. In response […] systems of law and control are at pains to monitor, capture and manipulate the intrusiveness of noise” (68). Similarly, Murphy notes that cut-ups act as “a form of practical demystification and subversion that could uncover the ideology at work in the political lines of the media” (“Exposing the Reality Film”, 39). In Murphy’s sense defining Burroughs’ use of poetic elements embedded in prose, in Electronic Revolution, as ‘cut-up’ is too broad and vague for what Burroughs is attempting. Rather he is attempting a radical and covert counter-discourse, a “counterrecording” as he writes in the unpunctuated essay “The Invisible Generation”, to expose the Reality Film, and in effect find new recruits for his revolution.

Conclusion

Burroughs’s work consistently challenges traditional genre boundaries and expectations. While his long-form works are often categorized as novels, they resist easy classification, embodying the fluid, heteroglot form envisioned by Bakhtin. This resistance to categorization is itself a political act, disrupting the “either/or” distinctions that underpin conventional literary and social systems, forming part of his “settling of scores with literature”.

His engagement with poetry and poetics extends beyond stylistic influence to encompass an affinity with the radical spirit of poets like Coleridge, Rimbaud, Perse, and Baudelaire. Their concerns with social critique, sensory disruption, and political revolution resonate throughout Burroughs’s work after Naked Lunch. Heeding Adorno’s call for a “barbarity” of language in the face of historical trauma, Burroughs’s poetics attempt to dismantle the “grammar of control and the syntax of command” (Bernstein, 202), and align with Varèse’s call for sound innovations, as experiments that disrupt conditioned reading practices and engage audiences in revolutionary ways.

Through his use of cut-ups, sound experiments, and textual noise, Burroughs attempts to disrupt the “Reality Film,” the constructed version of reality he sees as propagated by those in power. His writing becomes a form of performance, utilizing sound, noise, and the performative power of language to challenge dominant narratives and inspire social change. By blurring the lines between poetry and prose, Burroughs creates a radical counter-discourse that seeks to liberate language from the constraints of convention and control. His enduring legacy lies not only in his innovative techniques but also to his unwavering commitment to this appropriation of language, in all its forms, as a tool for resistance and social transformation.

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[1] Creeley may have been interested in Burroughs’ prose-poetics, given he explores the differences between poetry and prose directly in his 1951 essay “Notes for a New Prose”, while his review of Naked Lunch is glowingly titled “A New Testament”. See: Creeley, Robert, The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley, (244-47, 465-70).

[2] For comparison see pages 46 and 91 of Naked Lunch: The Restored Text and page 52 of The Yage Letters Redux.

[3] This understanding of Bakhtin’s view of poetry has been disputed, see: Eskin, Michael. “Bakhtin on Poetry.” Poetics Today, vol. 21 no. 2, 2000, p. 379-391.

[4] Note: I will be using […] to denote omitted words in quotation to avoid confusion with the standard ellipses in Burroughs’ work.

[5] I have examined this issue by considering ‘Burroughs-as-author’ as a function of discourse, pointing to his interrogation of categories of authorship: Heal, Benjamin J. “Authorship in Burroughs’s Red Night Trilogy and Bowles’s Translation of Moroccan Storytellers.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 18.5 (2016): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2966>

[6] I use “genealogy” here with reference to Veronique Lane’s study The French Genealogy of The Beat Generation (42).

[7] For more on this text’s history and importance see Harris’ introduction to: Sinclair Beiles et al. Minutes to Go: Redux, edited by Oliver Harris, Anzing: Moloko Press, 2020.

[8] Psychological studies have found that poetry is more memorable than prose, due to temporal organization and rhythmic structure, see: B. Tillmann and W. Jay Dowling, “Memory Decreases For Prose, But Not For Poetry”. Memory & Cognition 35, 628–639 (2007). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193301

[9] There are several studies that explore the poetics of hypnosis, for example, see: K. MacMillan, Trance-scripts: The Poetics of a Reflexive Guide to Hypnosis and Trance Talk. 1, Loughborough University, 1 Jan. 1996, https://hdl.handle.net/2134/7318.

Published: December 2024

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