This seems like a good time to tell you about a new project I am co-writing with my friend, Jennifer Armentrout. It is called Horoscopes for Ex-Lovers, and it is a weekly collection of thinly-veiled messages to the (fictional) exes of the “astrologers”. At this point it is still under development, so if you have any comments or suggestions they are absolutely welcome.
Happy Canada Day, Canadians!
Let’s talk about scale! My friend, Tim Maly, writes a blog called Quiet Babylon, and in this post he discusses scale:
These Secret Vespers installments are tagged with scale, though many others could be. That crushing sense is one of the hardest sensations for me to put to words. Like love, hope, and so many other pre-verbal feelings, I find I can set it up with words or art, but that’s all I can do. The rest happens in the viewer or reader.
I get sort of dizzy, sort of light-heading, and I feel sort of outside myself when the scale of something big hits me. The traffic seen from above a major highway does this to me. The ocean, especially when stormy, does this to me. That documentary, Baraka, does this to me.
But enough about me. What has given you a crushing sense of scale?
As Timothy Green puts it, “Poetry is everywhere… It happens by accident all the time.”
The idea behind his Found Poetry Project is to see what happens when you look for those accidents. Maybe a note on your power bill sounds like a haiku, or a message your drunk friend left sounds like free association. See what happens when you write them out like poems!
I found something and emailed it in. It’s called Public Retraction, and the original source should still come up if you google it.
I’ll leave you with a couple of links:
I enjoyed doing this. It didn’t take effort or inspiration or angst. It made me notice how odd and beautiful and seductive the ordinary language around me is, things I might never have thought about twice. The project is up and running, and absolutely anyone is allowed to try. I’d love to hear about the poems you find. If you like, then leave them as comments or leave links to them.