One morning I went for a summer ride--
Talking to everyone I met on the road,
The city streets were Helter-Hyper
up to their eyeballs in matte humidity.
A street carnival rounding the corner:
Swing Jazz from a slide trombone.
She saw it all from the store front window,
Old people dancing with sunken faces.
I heard pure silence in my brain,
the brownstones echoed machinery,
and cursed Straightforward, with no refrain,
blind to the window from white of sun.
Over the grass my slick bicycle,
could not be heard by the noised park,
Unlike the prayer, you wouldn’t approve
At ten o’clock in the morning.
I tried last week’s calisthenic again with a Frost Poem (above). I gave the exercise to our Fine Arts Department during a trading pedagogy techniques meeting. The music teachers really liked it, and our art teacher got an idea for a new art project from it. The cross curricular possibilities in Fine Arts continue to amaze me.
You're like a one-man cross-curricular art guru. I love this. Yes, all these techniques serve to estrange you from your own writing. With the written word, these types of defamiliarization are particularly difficult for some people, because we so often use language with our purposes preformed. Language becomes merely the vehicle of thought rather than the generator.
ReplyDeleteGood work. (And that Frost rendition is promising, too.)