Jody's Notes
Some poems are born the way this one was. I didn't see it coming. I just started writing something down, and kept going. The images in the poem I was creating weren't being cribbed from the scraps of paper that surrounded me--not even in part. They were entirely internal to the process of writing the poem--arising spontaneously in the moment of writing.
This way of writing poems can be quite thrilling, of course. (This kind of writing most closely resembles the experience of creating something from nothing.) And, in any case, I've written quite a few poems that resemble this one: rhetorically-propelled, they might be described as. A real (aesthetic) danger, of course, is that the dazzle of the rhetorical flow can obscure (for the author) otherwise obvious ways in which the poem needs some editing.
If the rhetorical flow is powerful enough, its effects survive even putting the poem away for a decade or so before examining it again for value.
Each dawn is somber,
not in itself, but by virtue
of repetition, its tight fit
in a temporal band of clones.
You would think it couldn’t go on
this way, that everything would
yawn to a stop, but it doesn’t—
pink, then yellow, then black and
over and over again like
a factory. Most things
strike me dumb like flowers
and insects, but I yell
each morning when this happens,
coin new words just to show
I’m different. I yell and
yell again before the echo
has a chance to fade. Anything
at all as long as I haven’t said
it before.
© 2009 Jody Azzouni