The Laboratory of Time

The Laboratory of Time, and other cutup poems, Peter Wortsman's third collection of experiments in the form, lets time be told in the way we live it, sometimes stretching a second into seeming eternity, sometimes compressing eternity into a second. The first part, titled "The True Glue," comprises recycled assemblages of words cut out of the newspaper that make a newfangled poetic sense. The second part, titled "The Five Books," is an admittedly unorthodox retelling of biblical narrative, the poetic sap and zap of it extracted by means of a vertical transcription.

Exhalations burdened with meaning, they are forever being uttered, stuttered and forgotten, trashed and mulched to fertilize new formulations. What else is a cutup poem after all, or any kind of poem for that matter, but a wild flower sprouting out of the dirt!