I want to be accessible, writing
With these pages, praising not rewriting.
This wouldn't change, still a screen, just rhyming;
History would end, lending its timing
When everyone I know was meant to last
Was fast enough for me, but still too fast
To me; then I don't want to write about
Lilacs, or slow down to let myself out
For everybody else. And it occurred,
And "accessible" meant "slow very word
To height, not distance," an unenjambed "when,"
Harder and not knowing I don't know; then
Berrigan, or Eliot. At nineteen,
Lilacs onto a dead sheet rhyme the screen.
2 comments:
I took "Accessible" and applied one of Ted Berrigan's methods to it, turning the sonnet inside out. It works up the odd lines, 1, 3, 5, et cetera, and then down the even ones, 14, 12, 10, et cetera, and requires just a bit of punctuation modification to weave it back together again. In some ways, it renders the original work even more profound, and also helps by showing up the weaker lines (L14 in the original is the weak L8 here.) I tried this as well with some of my older stuff (like Dragonfly) and the result was nearly abominable. If the L14-L8 revelation was meaningful insofar as it demonstrated the weakness of the line, then I wonder what this means for Dragonfly!
Here's a good link on Berrigan:
http://www.intercapillaryspace.org/2010/07/ted-berriganplagiarism-and-or-found.html
Ah, thank you for explaining! I did a double-take and figured you'd decided strangely to alter the original title for the first words seemed too familiar. This is a "Berrigan" twist, eh?
La, I wish I had the twain alongside each other to better see what exactly you did, but your explanation renders that rather unnecessary.
I dinna like the form thus mangled, but I just read last week in Mains' notes a similar styled "sonnet" with none of the proper end-rhyming the two accepted models require, just like this.
Interesting and lovely. Thought-provoking and fascinating.
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