Free-form excavations

Reed is back tomorrow.

Good, I say. Good. I don’t care for this ‘generating content’ lark.

How about another spot of juvenalia, while she can’t burst in and stop me? She wrote this one when she was barely 18, and falling in love with her future husband. Also blond, by the way.

Everyday I love your absent image
Hurts dully; and I have never cried for a man before,
I have never cried,
Though you are missing,
Though
Without you I am only myself,
As self-sufficient as glass, not
Needing an image to reflect,
Without beholding being nothing.
And I burn for your superimposition, I
Burn for the hands and voice
That make me ring through like a glass bell that
Ring me like a stone into clear water,
Alive,
To frighten silver fishes out,
Away from the sun-pierced centre,
Away from the shiver of bubbles,
Away from the place where only we are
Necessary as air or water.

Reed has long since given up vers libre, as she now finds it affected and embarrassing (oh, she’s so going to kill me when she gets home!). Me, I don’t know. A certain lack of counting syllables and considering rhymes for ‘orange’ can be excusable, surely? In any case, whoever brings Walt Whitman into the argument first wins.

No yawping, barbaric or otherwise, by order of The Management

5 Responses to “Free-form excavations”

  1. archie FCD Says:

    Reed should not be ashamed
    of vers libre.
    It is valid expression
    which she does so well.
    I know of a cockroach
    who does it well but
    he cannot do punctuation.
    So we can see into the soul
    of a cockroach
    as well as we can see into the soul
    of Reed
    with vers libre.
    Although with Reed we get commas instead of comas.

  2. archie FCD Says:

    Yawp!

  3. Ed Says:

    Admit it, both of you, NaBloPoMo has nothing to do with this sudden rush of daily communiqués. It has rather more to do with you having homework to avoid these days. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that these months fall in November, just when a new academic year’s novelty value has worn off.)

    “I burn for your superimposition”? Someday your prints will come…(© 1957, Old Joke Rehabilitation Project)

  4. healingmagichands Says:

    She was 18? Good heavens.

  5. Out of ideas » Blog Archive » To !!! or not to !!!, that is the ???!!?? Says:

    [...] I was playing with the NaBloPoMo Randomizer this morning, as one does when one knows very well one ought to be making notes on Library of Congress Subject Headings. (And, yes, Ed, you are quite right, most posters seem to be graduate students in the throes of essay-avoidance). It was a fairly amusing experience, if slightly heavy on the cute pet pictures. [...]

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