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Daily Notes on Poetry
14 November 2004. Today, I've been back in Paint Shop working on the presentation for teen-aged students that's on my schedule for tomorrow. Yesterday, just before going to bed, I prettym much randomly selected a few scraps of the cut-up newspapers I had on hand and made the following collage out of them:
I was following the instructions for the workshop exercise I'll be asking the kids to do. Next I tried to more or less randomly select some word I felt I could use with my collage (which seemed to me to suggest a dancer more than anything else, so tentatively represented celebration, for me). The word I came up with was an old favorite, "stone." I seemed clear to me that in a long division poem, "stone" would have to be multiplied by something to get whatever my collage represented. The first word that came to mind that I thought might work was "door." The idea was that door times stone would give the latter many openings, openings into just about anything. "Door," by itself, didn't seem sufficient, though. So it eventually became "doar"--to add something propulsive to the resulting product, and water images. That suggested "ora," with its suggestions of "oracle," "oration," "oratorio," and so on. Hence, I worked that in, as well as "or" and "a."
I now needed a word to use as either my dividend or as the term underneath it--something my collage and the product of "door" times "stone" might each be equal or near-equal to. The best I could come up with was "dream," a word I could probably use anywhere in any poem. My poem's words were thus:
When I added the collage, I thought of the minor remainder shown in the draft below:
This is not a final draft. I expect to rework the collage substantially. Other changes may occur, too, who knows.
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