Ever since reading Ai’s poem “Respect, 1967,” I’ve started to take poems written initially in a voice close to my own and write them a second time from a completely different perspective. The act of assuming another voice forces me away from the comfortable or triggering subject that allowed for my initial draft. Usually I write in a young, masculine voice, so when applicable, I rewrite drafts from an older and feminine perspective. I actually tried this in the poem “Beastiality,” one of my free responses for this week. I use this practice so that I don’t convince myself that my initial draft is amazing. Whenever I use this tactic, the second draft is almost always more provocative and more specific. Sometimes I blend the two drafts to give myself more language to work with, but I often just work with the new draft. In my poem “Black Paintings,” also written this week, I tried to combine the perspective of a father and son/fetus. I think both works are stronger because of this blend.
Script Folio 43 Split pomegranate, common rhinoceros beetle, Scarlet Turks='s cap lily folding back it's red lips while anthers circle the pistil's one hand: above them six lines are written in chancery script with lettere tagliate , letters cut like the long lines of pasta our parents cut on our plate, the work of two people who never met. The two halves of each letter--below and above-- are severed or sewn together by inked chain links like those that knot a fence or a stitch that unravels the whole length of a sentence if a stray thread is pulled--chain letter, chain gang, chain mail, chain saw-- or those paper links that wrap themselves around the Xmas tree: eentsy weentsy spider sidling up to each letter, each word, casting and binding in silk as if to ravel and unravel once felt the same. ---------------------------- Food Foods were eaten like the grossness our parents turned into freedom tickets away from the kitchen table, the alteration of rules we didn’t know exis...
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