Having been absorbed in Keith Waldrop's Selected poems - The Opposite of Letting the Mind Wander - I thought I'd try to see how he's working poems such as 'A Hatful of Flood' or 'Watermarks'. Extended numbered sequences each made up of short phrases or fragments.
So, this morning I'm taking a bundle of failed pieces and scrutinizing sentences and lines for what they suggest - cutting in, splicing together, resequencing syntax. Anything to shake the 'dead' words into life. Sometimes keeping within the original texts word world, sometimes working across texts. I don't think it matters - the rules are made up as you go along.
What's for sure, it's a great way of getting closer to KW's writing - although I make no claims that he writes in this way (if that makes sense). I notice the kinds of line length he employs, where he tends to turn. Also the framing devices - working two question phrases, for instance - to top and tail a section. But most of all it's his skill 'in between' phrases. I'm so bad at this - always overstating, making explicit, ironing things out. Working this way I see how the gap resonates and the two phrases come into a new accord. Sound-wise, it allows you greater freedom as the individual phrase can possess its own logic but you can leave openings for what could come before or after to resolve a vowel or consonant pattern.
Sequential (rational) logic is muted. As KW says in an interview "what I am after is closer to music than to philosophy or information or sense". Or as Rosmarie says a bit later citing Jabes: "the writer is nothing but a catalyst, he brings words together on a page. It's like luring people into a park where the lovers find each other".
As Ray DiPalma said: it's the FOCUS THAT GENERATES.
Great way to use up old scraps, too.
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