Tag: plums

• A Declaration

  To a poet long departed.

  (more…)

  October 23, 2024

  experimental poetry, free verse, influence, plums, poetics, Poetry, prunes

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• [In place of a poem, titled “Inventory,” that I would have written]

  

  Saturday, May 25, 2024, in Ghent. For R. M.

  1.
  There was a catalogue of things I had devised for this poem, the one I would have titled “Inventory,” to give shape and voice to the life I had lived in the past three years. Each stanza of the poem would have begun with the introduction there were, followed by a plural noun of the letter “C”: colors, countries, cities, companions, conversations, compositions, conclusions. These c-nouns, as I’d planned it, would have been headings for list-like observations.

  Some of the lines I drafted were clever. But my clever fiction collapsed in on itself when I wanted to include the nouns that didn’t start with “C” (space and time), even as I wanted to end it all on a heavy line: There was not enough time.

  Still, I wrote what I could in two stages. The first draft, which I scrawled in my sketchbook, was raw and rough. The second draft, which I penned in my thin notebook of poems, was better shaped though imperfect.

  But then the clock struck nine-thirty and I had to leave. So I put away the sketchbook, notebook, and pen in my backpack, and I left.

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  May 26, 2024

  conversation, friendship, Ghent, impression, inventory, laughter, memory, plums, Poetry, shoes

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