Week 9 this year has been a very busy time for me, with the Zora Neale Hurston groups finishing, the August Wilson DCPL group hitting its mid point full stride with 30 members, and a couple of job interviews that just happened upon me. Getting a job is the last thing I need to be thinking about, yet I feel deeply that I still have a contribution to make to the librarian craft. Meanwhile, work continues apace on my sonnet project and everyday I wake up with ideas to edit and rewrite in the final stages of my memoir project. So be it. The show, such as it is, must go on.
I recall my first exposure to this aleatory idea. I found the mesostic curiously fun, but it also seemed just a bit gimmicky. A poem from my ModPo 2012 notebook:
Notes from ModPo Essay #4 preps
So I went with the Bernadette Mayer experiment, one of them, slightly carved out for perhaps greater randomness. I began with a set of poems I had written previously, one per day for fourteen working days, on my work commute. Some days it was in the morning, some, at the end of the day. Once I had them all together, I took the first line from the first poem, the second line from the second one, and on and on, till I reached the 14th line of the 14th day poem. Then I cut and pasted them all into the sonnet below. Random chance.
Just something in passing – thinking about the poets –
The bean pie man hawks his wares at Foggy Bottom after work.
Some have white wires falling from their ears – sending texts,
The bus approached the stop as I was headed to the Green Line station.
Temporarily housed at Penn Center in NoMA,
The bridge that crosses the Anacostia River –
And the news is not good: a coup attempt is underway.
And so I’ll dedicate this subway poem
The words and deeds, archived records we leave behind
To mention the storm, and the flood, and all the death –
I’d rather be a mariner than an astronaut.
To know what I’d never experience again in quite the same way,
Sad-faced and wearing the kente of their African ancestry.
“We have Art in order not to die of the Truth.”
postscript. I was strolling through the 800’s at DC Public Library and stumbled upon a small volume, Black Mountain Poems: An Anthology. I have no particular expertise in the Black Mountain School, but would love to do a SloPo on it with some like-minded poetry lovers. The table of contents lists Josef Albers, Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and a dozen others. I’ll post this to the SloPo forum.
ModPo 