the following poem is an experimental form I’ve cooked up recently where I take the first and last words of every line in an existing poem by another poet and rearrange them in my own chosen order so that they make a somewhat coherent whole - lemme know whatcha think
Susanna—
she is thinking just of music
yet felt grass scraping on silk keys
and a choral refrain
waked the fetching maids
on a Hosanna melody
now she makes the blood pulse
in the quavering left hand
—tambourines … immortal tambourines—
soon night devotions crashed
against auroral strings
she came and cried rain sounds too
but they turned, fled, and —so going—
was escaping for
a Byzantine’s flame horns
Anon—
beauty, revealed, lives in(side)
the warm port-hole of the mind
—
Susanna’s leaves stood still
and —scenting— you feel
sound springs strain
she plays
—flowing scarves—
while she searched
cool imaginings
found concealed in the muted throb
of dew celebrations (and so on)
upon wavering shame emotions
and here the warm feet lay
she sighed
so praise, Susanna, the memory of
repenting Byzantines
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So, there it is; if any of you get the urge to tackle this form, you must indicate both the poet and the poem from whose words are being used in the title of your poem(s) as I have done with this poem I’ve submitted which I’ve sourced from Wallace Stevens’ “Peter Quince At The Clavier” again only using the first and last words of every line in each stanza. Further, you must use the words as they originally appeared in the source poem - you are not to alter any words so that they agree gramatically, mechanically and sytactically with one another. That’s, I think, the beauty of this form where you don’t have to follow the normal grammatical rules and you get happy accidents when you change from singular to plural number, past to present and/or future tenses, and 1st to 2nd and/or 3rd person (and vice-versa and any combo thereof), but if you manage to maintain gramatical sense throughout your poem, you get kudos from me.
Nels.
Oh, you must also remain faithful to the poet’s spelling of words as well as I have down with Stevens’ preference for British English spelling (i.e.:" tambourines" not tamborines" like “colour” not “color” also the reversed er/re suffix relationship with words like theater/theatre as well as ise/ize suffix words that are different between Brit and American English spellings. Any other spelling quirks must be faithfully observed.)