UnConscious Words Poet As Scribe
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 Ulysses and On the Road. I was curious if words were anything more than nails and boards with no meaning except to build and hold together a house. What I found, was that words were so much more. Collecting and repurposing the words from famous works grew into an astonishing collection of poems that expressed the original novel in a new way.
Words by Jack Kerouac – On the Road – 3
smoke spurt from the road
love mixed up with hopeless
expiring butts flung from the window
like broken souls
this is the road, this is the dream
as if all the confusion piles up
against the blue waters
now the mountains of California
Words from Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway 1
time can be horrible
still strolling – misery
knows the way exactly
over one moment, in release we laughed
asked, remember fun
almost swinging, almost glad
golden words like love
broken yet untouched lips
named the stars, shaped boundaries
please, teach the rest.
Words by James Joyce – Ulysses 2
this weather
makes you dull
an unhappy woman
crumpled and thrown away
blinds stripling the floor dark/light
a game board of domestic affairs
using kings and unicorns
startled by the simplicity of rules
his own self a hungry dance
under copper rain the feet sing
just before it all melted away
a full-grown man should not
be playing with unicorns or
gravely answering the ghost of a king