Challenge: Recycle something you wrote at least 5 years ago. Chop the original into lines and rearrange them. (For maximum recycling, come up with an arbitrary scheme for rearrangement, such as sorting the lines alphabetically.) Then cut every other line. Revise for the illusion of sense, or see where the new poem takes you.
I revisited a poem I wrote in April 2014: http://drmacdsnc.blogspot.com/2014/04/poem-day-17.html.
At the Séance for Dead Poets
Only six or so ghosts bothered to show -- embarrassed souls recalled from distant pasts, blinking with owl-eyed confusion (dizzy effect of unasked-for return), from dingy bars lit with deathly dissatisfaction instead of hope. We’d tried to invoke the Spirits of Romantic Love, but only these anonymous hacks arrived, befuddled, bent spectacled and inky, clutching incoherent notes, stoop-shouldered, distracted, lacking any historical attraction. Where have all the giants gone? we wondered. Are they just late? Then, sighing, we settled in with the seedy unreality we’d evoked, and later agreed that the current Living World must be inhospitable for Great Poets, cold and soulless as our colonized moon.
