I've been interested in collage poetry for some time now, especially that which combines more than one sorce text or disjoints one primary source to the point of unrecagnizsability. The Cuckoo by Peter Streckfus is an example of a pannarrative. Streckfus chose lines at random from Hsüan-tsang’s sixteenth century Chinese novel The Journey to the West, collaging them together into a purposefully disjointed and nonsensical narrative. This poetic form is fascinating to me and complex. I found an excellent discription of the form on Generator Press which I'll paste below.
Pannarrativity Pannarrativity: narratives (bits and pieces [fragments] of narrative) removed from their original context and placed [incorporated] into a new context take on new meanings (while retaining something of their original intention). Narrative — the word / logos — is everywhere. The world is a narrative. The world “writ large.” Pan- narrativity. The “pannarrative text.” A “text-collage” composed of bits and pieces (words, sentences, verses, various elements) of narrative (narrative as found / appropriation) “stitched” together. The pannarrative poem begins by seeing all the world as one great narration, a narrative that is known in proportion to the degree of the relation of its parts. The pannarrative poem, then, is constituted of fragments of narrative (which in their dislocative / disjunctive state are potentially plurisignificative) and uses juxtaposition as a principle of composition. (And like the metaphor, produces semantic changes, and thereby increases language.) While not quite on the level of the metaphor, I see pannarrativity as coming to be a sort of stand-in for the metaphor, requiring, to its own end, an intuitive competence — an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars as found in the disjunction (the logoclastics) that posits the juxtaposition. (And like the metaphor, produces semantic changes, and thereby increases language.) Pannarrativity and Anonymity The problem of pannarrativity and anonymity. anonymous writing. one does not belong to what one has written. signature / voice / sensibilities
