Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
The Sum of Its Parts
Posted on February 11, 2004 in Poems Writing Exercises
For the poetry workshop, I had the members of the group perform what is called a “cut-up”. Before the participants arrived, I took scissors to several poems and extracted good lines and startling phrases. Each person reached into the straw pile and pulled out a few pieces, doing their best to create a poem. They were allowed to change words, create bridge material, copy from their own notebooks. This came out for me:
There must be a backcountry of the beyond
to tell a thunder-whisper to.
Beyond this and farther out
the aureate earth pulls
the newly dead to it.
“What’s the use, Joel?” she said.
“At noon I will fall in love.”
May you kiss the wind then turn from it.
Show no haste.
One advantage of this for the workshop leader is that it gives the participants to sort through all kinds of poetic language and find what suits them. People were surprised that they’d brought in elements of William Blake, Robinson Jeffers, Louise Gluck, Edward Fitzgerald (Omar Khayam), Oliver Wendell Holmes — to name a few — and yet created something that was their voice.
