This is the first installment of a weekly experiment in which I share materials which I attempted — and in most cases, utterly failed — to turn into poems. Here’s the idea: I encounter an image or piece of language, try my best to respond to it with poetry, screw the whole thing up for one reason or another, give up, post it here for you, you turn them into poems or other artworks, and then you send the results to us (or pretend that none of this ever happened and submit them to magazines). Today’s material: The Failure of Man.
As I turned my MFA thesis into my first manuscript, I spent a lot of terribly entertaining and totally fruitless time trying to narrativize the collection. I felt like it had an arc, a conceptual development of an individual away from simple, totalizing cosmologies and towards messy personal ethics, and I spent a lot of time trying to get that arc across to readers in a way that was intuitive and interesting. Then one day, I was on Metafilter and encountered this:
Although it claims to be copyrighted, this chart has already entered the public domain: created by draftsman and Baptist minister Clarence Larkin, it chronicles the fall of humanity and the events of Revelations. Larkin made a lot of charts like this one, almost all of which are available online, but it was this one that spoke to me, maybe because it made falling apart look so much like progress, maybe because it looks a little bit like old charts of the motion of the moon.
So I fired up Photoshop (actually, the free version of Photoshop called GIMP) and erased all the text, and then sat there with the empty planets proceeding in their orderly way across a page which after all this inspiration, I suddenly had no idea what to do with. What was happening in the manuscript seemed to be too simple for such an intricate procession, and I didn’t have any clue how or where to include the graphic in the book (Proem? Cover? Appendix?). I ended up taking the collection in another direction entirely — the failure of “The Failure of Man.” But I did end up with a single, printable page that you can fill in yourself — either with software or (as I recommend, and as Clarence would certainly have done) by hand:
If you can figure out what goes in the circles, I’d love to know: leave a comment or email me here.
Next week: 9/11 ha ha ha : – )