Onto to the part of the story pertaining to the poem; after that year of research I found myself in graduate school, studying poetry. I also found myself stealing lines, even entire passages from my ancestor’s journal, and inserting them into my poems. At first, the poems took on the form of historical narratives, but as time went on, and as I learned the meaning of the word edit, they became something else altogether. In truth, I wasn’t exactly interested in writing a book about a young woman who traveled with Royalty. I was far more interested in the nature of her experience—this young person who traveled with people of importance—and yet there was no record of her other than this book which I couldn’t seem to file away. It occurred to me that in a way she was at once there and not there; and I was, at times, much more curious about what she hadn’t written. I felt strongly that I wanted to use her lines in some way, but not necessarily as a means to tell her story, but rather as a point of departure, a place to begin a poem. Eventually I landed on a technique that involved extracting dozens of her lines and using them as titles for my poems. A seventy-page manuscript was the result. I suspect that this was not quite the “write-up” my Grandmother had in mind—though it did “lead to something” as she had suggested. Here’s one of the poems that came about as I considered the hypothetical simultaneity of events in Turin in 1889:
Nietzsche in Eighty-Nine
haplessly sinking
pacing Turin
in and out of the lucid district
his kissing of the horse
her skipping to the park the concrete
traces of Freidrich’s swerving shoeprints
does she know him
does it matter
for presumption
of her passing the man
isn’t that enough
and anyway as he said
there are no eternal facts
At some point I decided to try writing a series of poems using only borrowed text. I, of course, borrowed from the travel journal, and this time selected 21-word passages, and used only those 21 words to write a poem. Then I wrote 21 of those. I think some of my teachers and classmates thought I was going a bit off the deep end, and hoped it was a phase I would grow out of. I did eventually return to my original technique, but the experience of writing with such a constraint was very informative. I was amazed at what came from it—combinations of words that wouldn’t otherwise have come into being. Which then makes me wonder if traditional and non-traditional poetic forms and techniques are really so dissimilar. At the very least it seems whatever the method used it is a means to an end—and offers the writer a unique opportunity to compose new work. One thing leads to another, and original verse comes to be.
It seems fitting to end with a fine example of a poem written by way of what John Cage called “writing through”—the poem is from Last Words, a book of poems by Guy Bennett—a book that came about almost the way a scientist often makes a discovery in the lab, by accident, or just by way of working on one thing and arriving at another. In this case Bennett was working as a typesetter for Sun & Moon Press and as a result of the software being used he had to manually break each line of Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation. To speed through this tedious task he found himself reciting the last words of each line. An idea was born and so was a collection of poems all written with the words of poets from Stein to Guest and Lorca to Mac Low.
The future weight
of words unthought
furrows feeling,
the hard stars obedient
to shadow air,
a ring of nothing.
You stood alone
without language,
your absent word
carved from time,
an unsilenced writing.
Sprung from memory,
the word was shape
to my high head.
My accurate hands
sized the dream bed
deep with eyes.
Images came
in gestures,
just like nothingness,
while you devolved
on sour language,
horizontal and
holding much secrecy.
--Guy Bennett
