I love these lost days between Christmas and the new Year. Time to walk around in slippers and make a mental note to do the hoovering tomorrow. Time to talk to friends on skype. Time to set new challenges for the new year (more on those later). And time to sit fiddling about with poems, dusting off some to send in to competitions next year, and editing others.
I spent this afternoon cutting up old poems and rearranging the sections to see what came out. This technique was used by William Burroughs amongst others, to generate new combinations of words. There's a film on youtube where he discusses it.
The process seems to work on the basis that a piece of writing is coherent and so the elements can be be moved and retain some of their connections even when in their new positions. It worked better on some poems than others, the outcome course, being combination of chance and decisions made in editing. Gerry Loose showed me this technique, and I was resistant at first because I thought it was a rather artificial way of treating a poem. I like it though. The results of the cut-up process remind me of the impression of poems you get when you hear them at a reading and carry away key elements some of which get muddled.
With my poems The Consultation seemed to work quite well - both the original and the cut-up version are below:
The Consultation
when you, who knew how to mull wine,
how to fix a bike, to wire a life for love,
sat in rooms on impossible chairs
learning to fold kind words into frankness.
Hands clasped to one side and elbows out
you were a parachutist falling to a waiting field;
fragile arms in firm parallels with the earth.
Some nights you lay like that in bed
and imagined the moment when we land:when the ground folds up to meet our arms
as the sky turns sideways.
How little we know how to fix.
You, who sat in rooms.
Firm parallels with learning to fold.
You lay like that in bed,
hands clasped.The moment when you
were a parachutist for love,
folds up to meet fragile arms.
Sideways – how to wire a life.
Some nights you, on impossible chairs,
imagined out kind words.
The ground, waiting field;
the sky turned to earth.
One side and falling now.
