I blew it. I've been under stress because of my bushwick to bushwick move., and boom! two days went by. The funny thing is that I've written poems in both those days and was just too tired to email them. Oh well, i got through most of the month unscathed.
I'm now combining my "thing" poems into "vs" poems, where I combine elements of both and...well, it would take a scientist to explain. The two poems I combined can be found here and here.
Here's my poem:
OATMEAL VS PILLOW
It takes time to freeze the currency,
where I step away from the button
and hum into the teacup, sleeping
outside of our arrangement, take
your bottles off of the record;
nuzzle the sides of buildings and
pretend we are window cleaner.
Why can't I pretend to be busy?
I dropped the scroll in the submarine.
Deferring to people will get you into trouble.
Everybody's leaving the library, wearing
the masks to impress the sounds of fanfare,
the party-goers enjoyed seeing it but they didn't
talk to the ebullient tyrant. I'm important and
I'm filled with forks. What a funny kid towers
over me, balls his fists, laughs and fights
over Google Maps, the wind outside
will be with you in a minute.
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3 comments:
I'm struck by an irony here: one of the poems that is "recylcled" to constitute this is part of a post in which you critique procedural writing...
Also -- the process here reminds me of those poems in Ted Berrigan's Sonnets that recycle earlier lines, sometimes according to a "program," and others in an improvisational way.
What I'm getting at here is that it might be useful to explain the procedure you use a bit more thoroughly, even though I could probably infer it from the two original texts.
Well, Nathan, you're very right about the irony. I suppose I was giving procedure a good tweak because I was doing it myself.
As far as my procedure, it's very loose and improvisational. I combine phrases from the two previous poems into new phrases, and you'd be surprised how much the poem writes itself. Hopefully the result is as interesting to you as it is to me.
Well, for whatever it's worth, I like some of these lines better than I do the originals. There's a bit more surprise, which I take to be essential to aesthetic pleasure.
It'd be interesting for you to attempt -- even if only once, and for shits and giggles -- a more rigorous/strict combination...
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