Experiment 2: Ripping up a Textbook
The Poem
The centre of gravity shifts
The imprint of my palm,
Sagging deeper under
The weight of past
Geographies.
Contours of promises
Made to tigers and dragons.
Trades made with tree bark
To ward off the major players
Of the tree fort.
The centre of gravity shifts –
Though not much more than this.
Bernadette Mayer’s suggestions:
1.
‘Rip apart a page from a book at random and study it as though it were poetic material.’
2. ‘Use science terms to write about childhood.’
This is my “science” book of choice: Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy by Peter Dicken, 7th Edition, 2015.
Those of you that know me well will also know that there is little else in the world I know less about than Economics. That is why this experiment was particularly provoking for me. I decided to use a chapter outline to perform the experiment, mainly because it has the highest concentration of technical terms on one page. I didn’t physically rip it up (because it’s my flatmates’ textbook!), but I did pick it apart and was left with the following terms and phrases to use:
The centre of gravity shifts
Imprint of past geographies
Trade has grown faster than output
Global shifts: the shifting contours of the global economic map
Europe is still a major player
Back to the future
The four tigers
Rebirth of the dragon
Indian promise
Unfulfilled potential
Persistent peripheries
The centre of gravity has shifted
Then lay the challenge of somehow using what I could from these phrases to write a poem about childhood. As I looked closer at the terms used in this outline, I realised that the “major players of the global economic map” could easily stand in for “the neighbourhood kids playing pretend in the backyard”. We had our “systems of trade”, though more often than not these included tree bark, leaves, and flower petals. We had our “borders”, mainly tree forts and bushes. And we grew up - though not without the imprint of the past.
