UnConscious Words - Poet as Scribe
Words are small things, always in the service of an advertisement or tweet. We forget that words carry their own history and gather more meaning every time an artist chooses, examines it, and fits it into the puzzle of her novel.
Like breathing, language has become a function of our autonomic nervous system, we talk all the time, yet rarely consider the words we use. Yet single words are powerful and reveal a great deal about the speaker and their message. To demonstrate this, I built poems using words from famous books like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I was curious if words were anything more than nails and boards with no meaning except to build and hold together meta meaning. What I found, was that words were so much more than building tools. Collecting and repurposing the words from famous works grew into an astonishing collection of poems that expressed the original novel in a new way.
The Process of Re-purposing
Building poems from these books was certainly an engaging, creative process. As I turned the pages of each book, I scanned the pages allowing my own unconscious to connect with the inert words on the page. I recorded any word that snagged my attention. This technique is based on many such experiments including the Dadaist poets who created their works by cutting up newsprint into individual words and scrambling them into new forms and meanings and black-out poems, a technique made popular by author and poet Austin Kleon who creates poems by isolating words on a newspaper or magazine page to express a new insight.
As these random words are pulled from their novels and rearranged, we can clearly see how different Hemingway is from Alcott yet how similar James Joyce is to Virginia Woolf.
Each of the books in this collection are autobiographical, the poems are biographical as well, and summarize the themes of the novel in surprising ways.
If you’ve ever needed or wanted additional insight into the books you read in your high school or college English class, this collection is a new way to appreciate and celebrate those works.
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Who in the fifties did not want to be Kerouac? Driving into the sunset on Route 66, and peeing from the top of a boxcar on the way? Who did not admire the Beat poets? And who doesn’t appropriate the images the Beats codified? From Thelma and Louise to Katy Perry, the road beckons the American artist as well as the immigrant who often traveled great distances to reach the continental US, and is still as restless as her ancestors were five generations ago. When we say Road Trip, we mean America.
Words by Jack Kerouac – On the Road – 1
Straight memories
glittering the whole time
frenzied finish – sad calm
prove the morning
shelve time-clocks and trees
a snake radio plays
drowsy grin, glad the treasure is yours
for me, it was too
much responsibility
