rewritten poem 1
Yes, well, I seem to have dropped the ball in my whole "I will update more often" initiative. I just don't seem to have the need to share the minutia of my life with the internet anymore. But we shall soldier on, and sometimes I will tell you some things, and sometimes they will be amusing.
This year, I won't delude myself into thinking that I can actually complete NaPoWriMo, but since it's here and everything, I thought I'd use it as an excuse to write some poems. I've been having some success lately with constraint-driven writing, particularly this "rewriting" technique that I've been developing. Basically, I choose a pre-existing poem, and then I transcribe every Xth word in that poem (where X is a value I determine arbitrarily in advance), and then I write a new poem that connects those words in the order that the original poem presented them.
I've done a couple of these in the past months with wildly famous poems, where the key words might be recognizable, but for these I think I'm just going to do the old "close my eyes and choose a book, flip to a random page" method. Here's one I completed just now, using every fifth word from "The Tinker Camp" by Richard Hugo, from The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir:
whatever luck they had, they made.
it’s us who are stuck, or is it just that
we can’t move our eyes, riveted to the horizon?
we would have lied, stolen, even
made their beds and kissed them goodnight, but you,
you are the “they” we read about in books. we might
scrape bare the places where kisses turned to food
for insult, so that scorn might seep through the skin.
and if this gesture signals anything,
well, we are not to blame.
This year, I won't delude myself into thinking that I can actually complete NaPoWriMo, but since it's here and everything, I thought I'd use it as an excuse to write some poems. I've been having some success lately with constraint-driven writing, particularly this "rewriting" technique that I've been developing. Basically, I choose a pre-existing poem, and then I transcribe every Xth word in that poem (where X is a value I determine arbitrarily in advance), and then I write a new poem that connects those words in the order that the original poem presented them.
I've done a couple of these in the past months with wildly famous poems, where the key words might be recognizable, but for these I think I'm just going to do the old "close my eyes and choose a book, flip to a random page" method. Here's one I completed just now, using every fifth word from "The Tinker Camp" by Richard Hugo, from The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir:
whatever luck they had, they made.
it’s us who are stuck, or is it just that
we can’t move our eyes, riveted to the horizon?
we would have lied, stolen, even
made their beds and kissed them goodnight, but you,
you are the “they” we read about in books. we might
scrape bare the places where kisses turned to food
for insult, so that scorn might seep through the skin.
and if this gesture signals anything,
well, we are not to blame.