I’m continuing to use my father’s name as a seed phrase with the boating magazine Soundings to create a poem. But instead of a diastic, today while reading through the magazine I picked up only words that consisted entirely of letters in his name (a sort of combination of an Oulipian beautiful-in-law and an erasure). While I set a constraint that I had to use the words in the order they appeared, I did give myself permission to delete articles, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, etc… as I saw fit. Since I had the letters t, h, e, a, o, n, r, otherwise the poem would become cluttered with the, that, they, on, etc… I did let some of that cluttering happen anyway, since at points I liked the awkward, stuttering effect.
I usually write poems that are punctuation-heavy (I especially have a fondness for dashes), but for this one I liked the ambiguity than no punctuation allowed.
meet the man to east
boats boaters are master
teak at sea ray more
than stores the northeast
the east Boston to a there
are many make team on the more
to team be there northeast Boston
May other by boats the shares
on boat the more by the set
to the man to the east to
that by the boat by steamboats
by teak make on the more
the boat systems
makes easy boat by
more on matters sea sense
by the story he
boaters the many some more
he’s on the there are they
he says these at the not
in their one to that be
the enemy to that short says
rather than there’s this
so many a meet too says better
to the means that’s has been
at the boat don’t to one
to their boat to try to break
the he to the Bahamas
not be the best on that one Banks
their boat the year their boat
to the Bahamas Banks baby been
to me as the same months the teak
the other the boat system
the system to a matter
some not to other they been to me
as the boat to more than the see
to see been to their best