I decided to shake up my diastic experiment this morning. Rather than using my father’s name to read through Soundings magazine, I’m instead using The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest as my source. Specifically, The Location of Things (I took reaching the end of that book as a signal to stop for now). My father…

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respectful to published   owned their reporters   Hassan had worm   went remember   digital trailing underwent   radiation collapsed job General supervisor devastated   Hawaii was hired   that assembly manufacturing everyone relationship   This is part of a series of diastic poems (à la Jackson Mac Low) in which I’m using my…

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rigged would   dubbed done after traditional   hits capabilities   performance knots automotive-grade   seatbacks   cushioned equipment   rocket hooks   ribbed were layers fillet   he’s Mainers work   photographs remember   baseball abandoned unpretentious   This is part of a series of diastic poems (à la Jackson Mac Low) in which…

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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).…

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I’m continuing my diastic reading of Soundings from yesterday. One thing I’m finding interesting is the relationship between two words that the method reveals (highlighted for me by the repetition that emerged today). While I know that it’s of course random (as rhyme is random), it feels fitting that the word “catamaran” has subtle similarities…

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Another diastic today (see yesterday’s poem). This one was done by using my father’s first and last name to search through the boating magazine Soundings (all text: ads, masthead, footer, etc…) Normally I would title this with his name, but I’m going to leave that out so it’s not readily searchable. I don’t think this…

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I felt like experimenting with Jackson Mac Low’s diastic method today. My source text was “What Is It Like to Be a Bee?,” an article originally published in Atlas Obscura. The phrase I used to read through the text was honeybee. When I reached the end of the article, I went back to the beginning.…

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I’m unsure whether there’s a lot of what I’m thinking of as “noise” that needs to be cut away here, or if the impenetrability of this one is something to keep, perhaps part of a surrealist charm. Until you made the law knowledgeable in paddle kisses, beehive sunsets knew stubbornness. Me, plate of the speck:…

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We think paper cuts. Single sheets, numerous intricate portraits of dainty awe, inspiring honing. A decade in flora: depictions of easily. Ultimately holds such strength, and it can cut. A flat can acquire light: a discovery. While limited tools convey amazingly even, the paper remains connected to inspiration. Delicate tracery of veins, the texture of…

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The seed of this draft was this year’s exceptionally bad allergies (again, starting with where I am in the moment). I ran with it a bit though and dove into the exaggeration. Stuck in some child’s slime, what a way to go. The world is gummy, the world is honey, the sin of being full…

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