Yesterday I thought a few people liked the talk about process, so I thought I’d do it again since today’s poem too has an unusual origin (I do like experimenting with strange composition methods). Oddly, for me the process talk is making posting very-fresh poems less vulnerable, though you’d think it would be the opposite. I think by “working in public,” I feel I’m setting the expectation that nothing’s going to be too polished.
Before I started my poem I spent about a half-hour or so with Barbara Guest’s “Illyria” (I’m currently going through Moscow Mansions). The way it’s constructed made me briefly wonder if there was a sort of skeleton of a more banal text into which Guest had inserted other words that took it somewhere else. Investigating this didn’t lead anywhere interesting, so I’ve rejected that theory, but I thought I’d try to create a poem like the one I’d imagined.
I found an unremarkable internet comment of mine that seemed to have a structure I could work with. Then, I took a few of my old poems and put them all at once into the Dada generator to make them strange for me and help me just see them as collections of words. I used these words to fill in the structure of the comment with more interesting text, largely led by whim, but also preserving some of the sentence structure from the skeleton of the internet comment. Here’s the result:
One Time
There was too much blue around so light
remembered: behind day the evening cups,
to billow instead of glint. Light
wasn’t patient about it.
That was the only time it got
charming but it was just because
oranges suggested brimming has pockets.
Light also lifts hums and chose
dawn along peel, but that
was a place to perch, not
flashing a street anew.
I’ll allow myself a good bit of distance from this one before working on it more. I’ve been finding that letting poems sit for six months or so is enough to forget about them and come back with a fresh mind. On to the next one tomorrow!
As an aside, the blog where I found the text of the poem to link to looks like a wide-ranging investigation of protest poetry, and worth browsing further.