Experiment 1: Write a poem that reflects another poem, as in a mirror.
The poem
Leave the dishes and
the unwashed window.
Hold your breath for
ten minutes
to an hour.
Do not last more
than the distance
between failures.
Shutter in all your knowing and your doing and see that
not everyone believes – that to write
a thousand poems
only takes the hour.
The experiment
I’ve recently come across the New York School poets and their experimental approaches to writing, reading, and sharing poetry. Among what was called the Second Generation New York School poets was Bernadette Mayer, who was known not only for her poetry projects and exhibits, but also for her innovative writing experiments. I was intrigued by her approaches and decided to perform an experiment on one of her own poems to create my own. I took two of her experiments to draw from:
Write a poem that reflects another poem, as in a mirror.
Study the possibilities of rearranging a work and rewriting the “source”.
I took Mayer’s poem, “Failures in Infinitives”, and used the last eleven lines to perform the experiment. This was her original:
This was the poem after I removed all the infinitives:
And this was the final result:
In performing these experiments, I attempted to begin only with ‘the illusion of an intention’ (Graham,“Notes on a Poetry of Release”), such as inverting Mayer’s poem, rather than a clear intent towards a purposeful poem. However, the experimental forms of 1960s/70s American poetry would imply that no form should be finite or closed. I would therefore encourage those reading at home to perform their own experiment on this poetry fragment! As Mayer writes, altering or obfuscating a poem ‘is to change the world. As it does which is why, nothing individually lost, there’s a difference to be told.’ (Mayer, “Obfuscating the Poem”,
