Welcome to another rewrite experiment.
I am going to take a poem and rewrite it every day this week. I anticipate using different methods like erasure, but who knows. I am approaching this without strategy.
That said I did have a strategy. I did have a poetry collection I wanted to use but I cannot find the book. I was going to pick something from Kazim Ali’s Autobiography and Cities, that I currently reading and loving, but I could not select out an excerpt.
On my desk is a small collection from Everyman’s library pocket poets, “Poems of the American West.” Every time I look at it I wonder, why is it on my desk? Then I think, I should really get this off my desk. I live on the east coast of the united states but I love the west, particularly the southwest. The southwest lights my imagination on fire.
This is what I did next…
I engaged in some bibliomancy. I picked up this book of poems of the american west and turned to a page at random. There was a poem by a poet I had never heard of, I imagined a cowboy, John Wayne, a story and mythology I had already heard. I want a new mythology by someone who’s story is not always told or retold. Perhaps that is a tall order from the “Everyman’s Library”.
I flipped again and found this poem…. which will be the subject of the rewrites. It is by Josephine Miles, a poet I had never heard of, although I like what I am reading so far, and I’m looking forward to learning more this week.
WEST FROM ITHICA
When we went out to a country inn for dinner,
We turned west at crossroads, west
Between maples, west
Toward a straight ridge of hills, where the sun
was setting.
There’s your west, Walter said; Berkeley.
But I saw the long labs and markets
In Illinois, of afternoons not yet ending,
High plains, Boulder, the descent
To Salt Lake, cattle and presses driving in Boise,
And somebody practicing sailing on the Bay,
Now it was dark, there was manifest Tsingdao,
Though I could go no farther now it was dark.
What do you really see in that strak of light over
the ridge?
I asked Walter.
Your west, he said.