Excited today. I took several failed poems and some new material on grief and the fragmentation of memory; I pulled out the hardest, strangest fragments; and I presented them on index cards, one fragment each. Like a small book, recovered from a fire. I call it "small elegy" after one of the fragments that goes (in toto) "..... if there is such a thing / as a small elegy .... "
I know, I know ... it sounds like one of those all-black paintings that's interesting only if you read the note on the wall. (Or all ready know what the note on the wall says.) I hope it's a little better than that. It seems better than that to me. Anyway, it's all Ivy's fault. Her and her poetry postcards.
I am sending it to West Coast Line. We'll see.
I also hope to use it as one example in my class on form. Open up the students' ideas on form a little bit. I plan to declare, for instance, that Jane Hirshfield invented a form in her "Poem with Two Endings."
Yes, I'll take the blame... but you know, I ain't the first!
Remember the movie "The Saint"? The lead scientist, a pretty chemist had _the_ formula on a series of notecards and not in her brain.
I'm sorry, but you reminded me of it.
Actually, I think this is great. I have a card set from when I was young which has fragments of sentences, and you can make things like:
"the gorilla was walking along the desert and ate some trees"
and other such silliness. Play, play with the form. Experimentation is the best.