Old Notebooks, Fresh Lines

My professor for my Language and the Arts class is open to the idea of a creative project for our end of class project/paper.  Since the class returns to the poems of Jericho Brown periodically, I proposed adopting his process/method for creating duplexes, and my professor agreed.  I will also be writing an essay on the theological implications that I uncover.

Yesterday I decided to get started.  Here's Jericho Brown, describing his process in this interview:

"With all my poems, and with the duplexes especially, but with all my poems, I really just try to use everything I have. I really want to imagine a world in which we have everything we need. And if I can imagine that world in my poems, I hope I can make that world come true in real life. People talk about what they do in their writing day or what they do with their writing time. One of the things that I’m doing is I’m really excavating lines that go back. There are lines in "The Tradition" that go as far back as 1999, and I’m going back and looking at all of those lines and trying to put them together, trying to use what I couldn’t use before because I should know now. I should be a better poet now than I was then, and yet, even then I was a poet and therefore, I had lines that worked. I just didn’t know how to make them work in a poem.

So that’s how the duplexes were made. I quite literally took every line that I had ever written in a poem that didn’t work, or every line that wasn’t yet in a poem that was 9-11 syllables long, and I put them all in a file. I printed them out. I cut them up. And I started working with them as little slips of paper."

I am not going to be able to take every line I haven't used in a poem.  It's not practical to go through 30 years of poetry notebooks, although the idea does intrigue me.  But yesterday, I spent several hours going through notebooks, typing lines into a Word document, and I only made it back to 2019.

I am impressed with these lines.  I think I now have enough lines to commence with cutting and shuffling, but I may go through a few more notebooks to add more.  My goal is to start cutting and shuffling during the parts of April when I'm at retreats and can leave the lines spread out if I need to.  Of course, if I do feel inspired to get started earlier, I will.  

Yesterday's process was different than the times when I look through poetry notebooks to evaluate poems in terms of whether or not they are ready to send out for publication.  Yesterday was much more fun, in many ways.  I was delighted in my lines without having to feel the frustration of a poem that didn't ever really come together.

I also see some throughlines in terms of symbols, themes, and images, but these were not surprising to me.  I'm aware of how my work repeats itself, both in good ways and bad.  Right now, I'm just happy to get anything on paper.  If I was further along in a poetry career--like if I was putting together a new and collected volume of poems--I would be worried in a different way.

I've always wanted to do this, to take lines from poems that didn't work and see what I could do with them.  But I've often been more compelled to work on new ideas, so I've never made it back to old lines.  I'm glad that I have a chance to do this for my seminary class.