An idea from the Surealists for revising poems - from Shadows on the Snow Part 2

Last Monday night a group of poets gathered to read poems and explore how to find guidance to write our own new poems. And then how to re-enter a draft and discover what might have been hidden from you in your writing process, until now? 

Here's one technique I've played with to discover the heart of a poem in revision. Sometimes the poem branches into two poems.

“I’d propose that…intense involvement in rich, descriptive speech also creates another subject,

which is the character of the perceiver. It’s a kind of perceptual signature, a record of a way of an individual way of seeing. This is one of the central things which poetry is: a vessel of

individuality, a distillation of the way one person experiences the world, knows herself in time

and in place.” - Mark Doty, “Speaking in Figures,” Poets.org

Automatic writing: Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early '20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious, influenced by the psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the political ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883). Using Freudian methods of free association, their poetry and prose drew upon the private world of the mind, traditionally restricted by reason and societal limitations, to produce surprising, unexpected imagery. The cerebral and irrational tenets of Surrealism find their ancestry in the clever and whimsical disregard for tradition fostered by Dadaism a decade earlier.

Prompt: Write an antonymic translation of your poem draft. Notice how the process requires you to define each word as you mean it before you then have to choose from an impossibility an opposite word. What words are the hardest to translate? What do you discover about what your poem is about through this translation?

Antonymic Translation – write the opposite of each of the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs OR by each general idea. For example:

·       To be or not to be: that is the question

·       To not be and to be: this was an answer

·       We had more important things to worry about than suicide

A Display of Mackerel (by Mark Doty - just the first few sentences)

 

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

 

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales'

radiant sections

 

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

 

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

 

think sun on gasoline.

Here is my translation of the first few sentences of Mark Doty's amazing poem A Display of Mackerel:

Antonymic Translation (my own)

I stand myself a column

Under fire, foot nor navel,

Not an inch of matte dark-

Solid, a lighted hole

Undivided, and skin

Invisibled

Not any indication

Of my making.

Gravity, dirt,

Inward: know tubor,

Domestic celery

Bulb buried within itself,

Know moon and cheese.

 

Explore your poem by listing some images that stand out from your antonymic translation or your poem you have written. What are the possibilities they create?

·       Study these details you have written. “…they aren't "neutral," though they might pretend to be, but instead suggest a point of view, a stance toward what is being seen”

·       Inquire what this stance or place of viewing within an image or world could be?