The cedar dies
from the top,
the prisoner dies
in the pit
Of nine strong bonds
I’ve worn out eight
the ninth one
wearies me.
Prisoners’ Song from the Hungarian
Trevor Joyce, What’s in Store (Gig / New Writers Press, 2008)
Good-by old man
Turn the key
Darkness is not your friend
The willows bend
Knock, knock, dear Reaper
Open the black door
Kill the cat
Jump over me.
Stephen Vincent, Untitled poem from the English of Trevor Joyce’s Prisoner Song in Folk Songs from the Hungarian.
Lately I have dropped my ’sweet reed’, that is my Haptic making Faber-Castel India ink brush, to pick up various ball-point pens, filling my journal pages with a series of poems in a project I call Trellis. The writing process is built on metrical patterns from which I have copied frompoems by Trevor Joyce in his recent, and I think, brilliant volume, What’s In Store [If you not read my new review of the work, it’s published in Galatea Resurrects #9]
With a Trevor poem, I simply match the line count, and then pair the lines either by their word count, or syllable count. I do closely read the originating poem and, sometimes, my content will mirror and comment on Trevor’s content, though, often any thematic relationship is, at best, oblique or not there at all. Trevor’s poems give my pieces a formal frame on which to rise and make words that fit. As with Trevor’s work, his forms compel a making that is similar to the challenges faced by a stone mason where the stones first need to be chosen in a way that will fit the structure. Imagination comes in to play as a means to pick words with an appropriate texture, color, etc. Those choices make the difference between a dull or interesting poem.
The excitement of this kind of making is that the poem’s formal structure may provoke content/rhythms & a ‘music’ that in turns - sometimes an abrupt torque - may constantly surprise. What’s opened up on the page is, ideally, revelatory to both maker and reader. How this process is similar to surrealist and Ouilipo exercises, I suspect, has been discussed elsewhere. It does not interest me to go there right now. I am have too much obsessive fun watching new stuff pop out of the hat.
Gone
Sure blessing
Cross without nails
Beauty burns
Such holes
Backwards
In bunches
Braided
Gold silk
Slender throat
Enamel
White collar
She
Does not
Belong to God
Nor witness
Blue silk
Angels
The sky pumped
Clouded
Pure
Crimson.
("Binging away" on several in a row, I forgot to note the poem from where I got the formal count and arrangement on this one!)
Appreciate your comments.
Stephen Vincent
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
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