Two poets in a muddle. Or rather two poems. John Ashbery’s A Mood of Quiet Beauty (from April Galleons 1987) meets T.S.Eliot’s first Prelude (Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917) You can read the originals at those links.
In the spirit of OuLiPo – and just for the playful hell of it – I switched out the nouns in each poem in the order of appearance changing only singular to plural and vice versa if sense required.
Suggestion: Read each new poem aloud as if it has the deepest meaning and resonance. And you will find it does! It’s magic!
Mood
I
The winter beauty settles down
With light of honey in trees.
End.
The burnt-out street of smoky sunsets.
And now a gusty drawbridge wraps
The grimy flowers
Of withered horizon about your stones
And dreams from vacant suicide;
The balloons beat
On broken something and days,
And at the pressing of the blood
A lonely thing steams and stamps.
And then the museums of the breath.
– by John Eliot
A Prelude of Quiet Evening
The evening steak was like passageways in the six o’clock
When you left me and walked to the ends of the days
Where the shower abruptly ended.
The wedding-cake scrap lowered itself
To the fragile forget-me-not leaves.
You climbed aboard.
Burnt feet suddenly paved with golden newspapers,
Lots I had, including showers,
Puff out the hot-air blind now.
It is bursting, it is about to burst
With something invisible
Just during the chimney-pots.
We hear, and sometimes learn,
Pressing so close
And fetch the corner down, and things like that.
Cab-horses then became generous, they live in our lamps.
– T.S.Ashbery
And here they are: Two incomparable, peerless poets in a jumble. And actually – not so odd a couple.
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I think I found Ashberry easier to understand with this transposition. I don't know about my block about him. No trouble with Eliot but always freeze when bumping into Ashberry.
I know what you mean. I always have this lingering suspicion he's pulling a fast one. I usually read him rather like taking a dip - the words wash around and then I see how I feel after a few strokes. I do enjoy "Mood of Quiet beauty" even though he loses me toward the end. I find it doesn't matter. The heartbreak is this there.
Very interesting to try, and to see what happens. These are great! I feel the benefits of applying seemingly random rules to writing in this way. Am currently writing a short story in a series of tweets - it's been done before I'm sure but I appreciate the restrictions and in my case the form is of a piece with the theme and title.
Agreed. Playing within constraints is revealing. And doing violence like this to the integrity of a text actually helps me read more closely and with greater appreciation. You begin to see just how extraordinary the original is. Meanwhile, you have some fun with some unexpected and serendipitous results.
Your tweet-story sounds fascinating!
Fascinating - and fun. I like your remakes better, too!
Well - they certainly make their own kind of sense if you read them aloud as if they were really important and most meaningful.
Wonderful poems and almost better in your arrangement. And then I went to John Ashbery's Nest and and there on the wall beside the staircase is OUR Chikanobou..or one very like it.
That 'nest' project is something! What a labor of love. And now Hudson is a tourist destination and something of a gay male mecca. I don't think that's a Chikanobu though - not that I'm anything of an expert.