Monday, February 14, 2005

Turning Prose to Verse

In attempting a short narrative poem, I'm in the process of converting my prose post of 2/9 (Incident at the Lunar New Year) into verse. It’s an interesting experiment. And one that I think could be useful in the future. It’s easier for me to write a narrative in prose. Later I can bang it into verse. Here’s the first three stanzas:
Where the Deer and Coyote Play

That the wildlife refuge on Plum Island
is not a sanctuary from concerns
of business, home, or everything pop culture,
but topography for being wild—

as shorebirds, songbirds, hawks, coyote, deer,
and that occasional photographer
or poet—is not a thing that every creature
sees. For instance, birders look for Iceland

Gulls, Tri-colored Herons, or Virginia
Rails, and almost never know the land
itself, that wilderness of marshes, dunes,
and start to infinite Atlantic seas.
Blithely I go along, and to be continued.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I like this poem very much.