Medusa's Head

Maybe it is just that I am nostalgic for Prague, three years later, and just got an email that Arnost Lustig will be in Kalamazoo soon, but this movie I just watched on TV has got me thinking. The movie is The Visit (1964) starring Ingrid Bergman, and although it isn’t as artsy as the Czech films we watched in Prague, it has that same dark flavor to it. I suggest that anyone who hasn’t watched it Netflix it immediately. The gist of the movie is that Bergman was run out of town as a pregnant teen after filing a paternity suit against her lover. He bribes two witnesses for a bottle of brandy each to say that she is promiscuous. The authorities take her child, who quickly dies in an institution, label her a fallen woman, and she becomes a big city prostitute. Years later, she returns, a wealthy woman, with a proposition for the town that turned its back on her. They are struggling…the local mines, the factory, the riverside...all their business has mysteriously dried up and she offers th...

I've decided to create a form that mimics the movement of the rotary lawnmower. The purpose of the form is, I think, like the purpose of mowing, to create order out of unorderliness through the means of repetitive violence, to create motion in form through repetition at the beginning and end of a stanza. The first decision is, is the lawnmower a mulching or bag type? The second is, which words will be repeated? I've decided on two verbs, but I think nouns could maybe work too. As for the lawn, I've toyed with the idea of making a list of messiness and then just mowing through it with the twin blades of my chosen verbs. But I think narrative situations offer messiness as well, so it wouldn't have to be lyrical. I like the idea of quatrains, because they're nice and rectangular, like rooms and like lawns and I think that has a lot to do with the idea of maintenance, that there is a shape you are trying to trim things into. Line length should be even, but long or short...

It’s not at all a new idea to suggest that poetry takes inspiration from other art forms, the sciences, or the natural world. What I’m interested in here is the shape, the form, the organic theory of poetry and how different models of creation or elements of design from other disciplines: architecture, painting, astronomy, might be useful for creating new poems. Thanks again Stock Xchange :)