I’m blessed to have as a friend a talented poet and classical musician and teacher by the name of Alfred.  He’s an expat American living in a Paris suburb, and he writes fairly prolifically on another website (follow the link at left marked “Scattered leaves with poetic imprints” to sample a small portion of his recent work.)  His poetry is consistently very good, ranging not infrequently to the outstanding.

Alfred has encouraged, prodded, instructed, and corrected me in my attempts to write poetry, bless his heart, with not a whole lot to show for it, I’m afraid.  I’ve got about as much talent writing poetry as the Detroit Lions have playing football, but, like the Lions, through dint of hard work and practice, well, maybe I’ll win a few this year.

His most recent effort to help jump-start me, along with the rest of his readers, is entitled “How to Create Poetry from an Ordinary Text.”  His idea, in a nutshell, is to take a piece of prose and mold it into a poem by first arranging the text in poetic line breaks and then by massaging the words, changing them as necessary while still retaining the feel of the original text.

I took the opening paragraph from Chapter One of James Lee Burke’s literary thriller, The Tin Roof Blowdown.  In it, Burke’s long-time protagonist, Detective Dave Robichaux of the Iberia Parish, Louisiana, sheriff’s department, recalls his worst nightmare from his service time in Vietnam.  He will soon come to see worse as he’s assigned to work in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina...

“My worst dreams have always contained images of brown water and fields of elephant grass and the downdraft of helicopter blades.  The dreams are in color but they contain no sound, not of drowned voices in the river or the explosions under the hooches in the village we burned or the thropping of the Jolly Green and the gunships coming low and flat across the canopy, like insects pasted against a molten sun.”

© 2007, James Lee Burke.

I first arranged the line breaks so the text, already quite lyrical in prose form, would more closely resemble a poem:

My worst dreams have always

contained images of brown

water and fields of elephant

grass and the downdraft

of helicopter blades

The dreams are in color but

they contain no sound

not of drowned voices

in the river or the explosions

under the hooches in the village

we burned or the thropping of

the Jolly Green and the gunships

coming low and flat across the canopy

like insects pasted against

a molten sun.

The final step is the one that requires the majority of the work:  shape these words, substituting here and there to place my own mark on the piece while still preserving as much of the lyricism and impact of Burke’s foundation as possible.

Here is the completed version of my experiment with Alfred’s idea:

jungle nightmares

My night sweat terrors:

brown water rippling, fields

of elephant grass flattened

by helicopter downdrafts.

Silent reels of Technicolor dreams—

drowned voices in the river, unheard;

exploding hooches in the Zippo’d ville,

and the thropping percussive beat of

Jolly Green and the Gunships, mute,

as they came in low and flat

across the dense jungle canopy--

insects pasted against a molten sun.

So, who would like to take the ball and run with it?  Select your own prose piece from whatever source (minding your copyright acknowledgements where appropriate) and see what you can do!