[Jennifer
Liston grew up in Co Galway, Ireland & now lives in Adelaide, South
Australia. Her procedural poetry, as
presented here, adds significantly to the line of such poetry in modern &
postmodern writing – in both her poems & poetics. The idea of the “rescued poem” is indubitably
her own, and a further collection of poems as examples will shortly be gathered as
a book. (J.R.)]
What Is a ‘Rescued Poem’?
In The Writing Experiment, Strategies for
Innovative Creative Writing, Hazel Smith discusses recycling text in
chapter four, ‘Writing as Recycling’. ‘Collage encourages you to approach creative
writing through other means than personal experience,’ she says. ‘Your
creativity is expressed through your choice of texts, the way you structure
their relationship and the degree to which you transform them.’
Reminiscent of ‘Language’ poetry, the concept of
recreating texts from existing texts intrigued me and captured my imagination.
I love the ‘lego-ness’ of language and its functions. Also, I like replicable
processes, probably thanks to my engineering background.
One does not usually associate processes with creative
writing endeavours. I believe, however, that occupying the mind with a process
that does not demand too much conscious attention switches the mind into a
creative state; at least this is what I experienced when I immersed myself in
the process of rescuing poems. I had a limited number of words from which to
choose and my creative self was happy to dip into this limited vocabulary and
construct images. One could argue that the creative process is impeded somewhat
in this way, but sometimes choices can overwhelm and paralyse the mind causing
it to be unable (or unwilling) to create at all. Limiting options may create a
doorway through which the mind is more ready to leap.
I formalised the rescue process and I call the
resulting poems ‘rescued’ rather than ‘collage’ because it seems to me that
ideas are latent within texts. Using this process I could find them and sculpt
them into poetic relief using this special recovery mechanism. Sometimes the
ideas are closely associated with the subject of the source texts themselves;
other times the ideas had very little or nothing to do with the source texts.
Here is a summary of the process I created.
§ I
select two books. I may pick two with similar themes; two that are very
different; two by the same writer; sometimes I just choose at random.
§ I
select the number of one page in each book using the RANDBETWEEN function in
Excel.
§ I
transcribe the text of each page into a Word document and columnise the text so
that one word is on each line.
§ I copy this column of text into the online word scrambler at
http://textmechanic.com/Sort-Text-Lines.html and use the online scrambler’s
‘Random’ function to jumble the words.
§ I
copy the scrambled column of words back into the original Word document and
change the column back into a block of text.
§ I
print out the pages of randomised words and underline words that catch my eye.
§ I
write those words out in a jumble on another blank page.
§ From
these words I write the rescued poem.
An important point to note is that I sort words (rather than phrases) individually so there is no danger of reproducing slabs of original text in a rescued poem. This means they are not like ‘found’ poems and also there are no copyright issues to consider
[Two rescued poems follow.]
…a poem is a river…
how
it hears us, feet on stone
how
it gives skin colour
how
it curls the lonely moon
through
night-time by-ways
and
the faithful sun
through
morning blue.
How
it has us waiting and following
delaying
and crossing
and
leaves us clutching our hands
exposed
and desolate.
How
it says
see,
there is beauty in the old and wrinkled face
in
the cold and the bare face.
How
it says
that
silver wolves wake ancient lives in us.
A
poem is a river
drowned
in time,
first,
leaving us
sliding
and
falling,
then
f
l y i n g,
f l
y i n g!
Rescued
from The Celtic Twilight (p. 22) by W
B Yeats and Ireland Under Elizabeth
(p. 67) by Philip O'Sullivan Bear
…queer as
a copper shilling…
The
spirit standing in the doorway
had
an infinite, heavy sadness to it;
a
weight of troubles from another world.
Is
you dead, I says.
What thinks you, he replied.
When I was living my enemies took power,
destroyed my castle, my kingdom.
What I feared more than anything else came to
pass:
terrible misfortune on the land,
winds of damage turned families and visionaries to
peasants,
pleasure of music and poems a memory,
a place whose masters have no heart
an earth whose heavens are foregoing…
He
seemed kind, strong.
They are so distant from me, said he, neither day
nor night,
time nor words, make me feel that...
If you would talk to... if you would...
His
voice began to fail.
They
see me as half-mad, I says, queer as a copper shilling.
Talking
to you, about you, is no wise things for me.
So
I has written this down
I
is no mystical person, I is already damaged,
lodging
in this place
longing
to trim my own winged mind.
Rescued
from The Celtic Twilight (p. 9) by W
B Yeats and The History of the Town and the County of the Town of Galway (p. 65) by
James Hardiman
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