Trying out writing techniques so that I can devise my own experiments and such (watch out Charles Bernstein), I came up with a few ideas. For this first one, I wrote an acrostic poem (the lines beginning with letters that spell out a word, usually a name, so my lines start with the letters in my first name), and each line is actually a line taken from a reference book that contains an alphabetical index of many everyday phrases, with information about their origins and how they entered our vernacular etc. But I ignored that, just took the phrase itself and disregarded both meaning and explanation, and tried to pick phrases that, when arranged int the acrostic, would make some sort of sense or convey an idea, not entirely nonsensical:
Darkness and gnashing of the teeth.
And so it goes-
I never promised you a rose garden,
Streets paved with gold-
You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.
The next technique I used was a standard cut-up but the text I entered to be cut up was that of a few of my favourite writers. There's part of a poem by Alice Oswald, a poem by Adrienne Rich, some Jack Kerouac words and a poem by Catherine Piece, along with Meditations in an Emergency (Frank O'Hara). I tried to stick to the rearranged words as much as possible:
Clouds scampered, prowling at an afternoon distance
hung-up and mad, moving between the vague world
and rain-coloured skies.Whiteness
pouring into backseats- dreaming a sparkler for remembrance.
Somewhere in that huge wilderness of stars
and dark things and lost pieces are missing wings,
once spare parts of your adventurous past. Forgotten now,
loneliness polished hearts- small stones.
Galaxies shaking, whispering echoes.
The clouds keep their contours, reddening with suntans.
Nobody paces at night.
