One of our final projects for my summer class, in addition to creating a blog, was to create a chapbook in which we do some composting.
Not in the traditional sense, but the metaphorical one — taking materials you already have, breaking them down into a nice smelly soil, and watering it until you grow a tomato plant or an apple tree or a lavender bush. Breaking down the old to make new. Something this planet of ours has been doing quietly throughout the ages.
All quarter I’ve been splicing up tweets, Facebook statuses, texts, and even Craigslist personal ads to make poems. It was fun, it felt fresh every time, and I seemed to be fairly successful at executing it so with a nod from my prof I made a nice little chapbook out of them.
These are just excerpts from the whole, which contains 10 poems as well as an epigraph (shown) and an introduction, which my scanner decided was unimportant enough to simply not scan at all! But I win this round, thanks to Microsoft Word.
These poems are each made from multiple sources—tweets, status updates, Craigslist casual encounters ads, and text messages.
While most content on social media is discarded as meaningless, trite, and narcissistic, these poems serve to show how such shallow nothings, when spliced together, form a complex, powerful whole that presents us with the gist of all our offhand thoughts and feelings— frustration, loneliness, ennui, and an underlying, though often subtle, sense of humor.
Ten small testaments to the millennial generation and those who struggled before us.
The whole thing is made from a book called Basic Tools of Research which a good friend of mine gave to me because it said “a great reference for English majors” on the front cover. Thanks, Allan — your gag gift ended up becoming the backbone of something arguably more interesting (I hope).
Well, that’s a wrap on my summer course. Between this and my visual poetry class from last quarter, I’ve grown like a weed. I struggle now with making poems that don’t have a major visual element — not out of habit, out of… love? For lack of a better word, it’s love, I guess. It’s something I don’t see myself tiring of, and I can’t say that for most anything else.
K, after all that mush, I’ll leave you with something comical. I’ve mentioned before how my scanner likes to cut things up and send me chunks instead of a whole, and scanning my chapbook was no exception. I’ve been meaning to do something with all of these but for now I’ll just put the chapbook chunks here so you can see what I’m whining about.
Without further ado, my scanner’s debut visual poem:
watchtheFruits 