How I Wrote Some of These Writings I was not born a poet. I have no talent. Yet by the time I was eighteen, I wanted to be one. In order to compensate for my lack of talent, I had to make up ways of writing poetry, methods, procedures -- a pretext. My difficulty, I found, was due to a terrible case of self-consciousness, so that every word in a poem had to be weighed so many times that hardly any words ever got written. It was very constipating. The first procedure I adopted was used to write the Revolving Poems. Either intuitively or through textual appropriation I would write disconnected lines, usually not more than four or five. I would break each line in the middle (a caesura) and then "revolve" (combine ) the first half of every line with the second half of the other lines. In this way an original four-line stanza, for example, would generate three more four-line stanzas, exhausting the possibilities of the lines. Also the original stanza often would be used to generate an additional, final "free" stanza, in which the first half-lines would revolve among themselves and the second half-lines would revolve among themselves. |
|
|