Hi Doug,
My actual method was not real 'method'. I was thinking of using phrases but I did not have my copy of Voss to hand (still in storage). I found a site, as you do, which discussed the novel and had generous slabs of quotes from all parts of it. So I sampled that for words but concentrated on words from the sections either about the desert journey and/or directly related to Johann or Laura.
My method if any, apart from that, was to find at least a few words that seemed striking or whitish ('twanging') and knit it up into something that gestured to the aboutness of the novel, including the use of German due to it being Voss. I have a wee bit of German so it was not hard on that level.
So, the constraint was the words of the novel. then I followed my nose. And kept the Nolan cover design in mind.
It was one of two poems I wrote for a performance of poems around an exhibition on White at the State Library of NSW which has an extensive collection of papers, paintings and photos and objects of White's. I won't be at the performance, my work will be read by others. But I wanted to do it, even from far South Aussie.
Here's a link where you can see the Nolan cover and another pic of White in front of a Nolan painting, about which I also wrote.
http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/events/exhibitions/2012/patrick_white/index.html
Cheers,
Jill
On 31/08/2012, at 2:09 AM, Douglas Barbour wrote:
> I like it Jill, but wonder what the actual method was. It could be read as a kind of homolinguistic translation, perhaps....
>
> Doug
> On 2012-08-30, at 7:13 AM, Jill Jones <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> thank ye
>>
>> some of it does, did - some i coulda done without
>>
>> J
>>
>>
>> On 30/08/2012, at 8:08 PM, Patrick McManus wrote:
>>
>>> Jill hope the brooding goes well
>>> P Vossed
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jill Jones
>>> Sent: 30 August 2012 08:56
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: snap voss words
>>>
>>> 'The air will tell us'
>>>
>>> - Patched from Voss
>>>
>>> Strings, forms, necessity
>>> break continually,
>>> material
>>> shapes
>>> immaterial.
>>>
>>> Cave, candlewax, tears
>>> twanging
>>> silky, brilliant brooding
>>> flesh.
>>> Johann! Laura!
>>>
>>> Blowfly, rainbow, scrub
>>> whispers legend
>>> mortally, eternal
>>> disturbing
>>> white trivialities.
>>>
>>> Henceforth, air
>>> Sprachen
>>> blau, Himmel.
>>>
>>> [Each word in the poem also appears separately somewhere in the novel Voss. The poem s title is spoken by Laura Trevelyan in the novel.]
>>>
>>> - after Cover design for Voss, 1957, Sidney Nolan
>>>
>>> A snap as it was written this week for a project. And it as been a brooding kind of week.
>>
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
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> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
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> Why can’t words mean what they say?
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