Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Variation on "between the lines" exercise

Have you seen the poetry of Jim Morrison?

It's the sort of sprawling, uneven, grandiloquent stuff you'd expect.

I did this before, and I'm doing it again: I copy a stretch of Morrison's writing from the site referenced above. When I paste it into a Word document, for whatever reason it removes all of the line breaks. I use this to my advantage by re-breaking the lines--again, I caution, without reading too much of what I'm working with.

This time around I used the three-inch marker on the Word page as a guide for line breaks. Here's the chunk of Lizard King:

Forest strong sandals
 burnt geometry
fingers 
around a fire 
reading history in
blackened
 books, charcoal silence 
in
moot splendor

 Flame-tree
 Sire, we met
in Eden
 The troubled time
 we had 
rustling
in the night leaves
 a sniper aimed at our
window
a kitten mewing in the blasted

strong air 
I must go see

-You've found
your Voice, 
friend, after all else 
I recognize
fast the
 Strong sure tones of 
a poet
 was
it a question
 Search or of strangling?

I wonder
 We never talked 
But welcome
here
 to the camp fire
 Share our meal

w/ us
 & tell us of your life
 & the hanging


Now my task is to 'respond" to each line, thereby getting a bunch of raw, probably imagistic text from which I can make something like a poem. More on that later.

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