Thursday, October 13, 2011

Found poem

Fascinating thing to do - I used line breaks and punctuation to break down a short paragraph from one of the Sunday newspapers.  I'm not convinced it works as a poem but the malleability of the meaning of the same words in different relation to each other is instructive.

Here's the poem, followed by the source:


What happened on 27 October 1986?

What was open? Outcry. Unlike: so many
other types.

Of revolution, the big bang
was characterised by the disappearance of screaming.

Crowds. The practice of share-trading being.

Conducted: verbally. Face to face on one. Market.

Floor was replaced with computer and telephone.
Communications between dealing.

Rooms spread across the city.




An edit, since I failed to explain what I thought I was doing with this on Monday:  
I was interested in what happens when a completely impersonal piece of text like this is subjected to a semblance of the formatting of the modern lyric, the trajectory it takes towards the personal when rearranged in such fashion.   I think it catches, however imprecisely, the inter-personal element - perhaps failures - of the process of changing modes of interaction which the original text outlines, with its references to share-trading being, and the anomie of the spreading separateness of rooms.  Possibly it would work better if I subjected it to further modification rather than just re-punctuating and reformatting it, though.

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