fragments as form

Excited today. I took several failed poems and some new material on grief and the fragmentation of memory; I pulled out the hardest, strangest fragments; and I presented them on index cards, one fragment each. Like a small book, recovered from a fire. I call it "small elegy" after one of the fragments that goes (in toto) "..... if there is such a thing / as a small elegy .... "

I know, I know ... it sounds like one of those all-black paintings that's interesting only if you read the note on the wall. (Or all ready know what the note on the wall says.) I hope it's a little better than that. It seems better than that to me. Anyway, it's all Ivy's fault. Her and her poetry postcards.

I am sending it to West Coast Line. We'll see.

I also hope to use it as one example in my class on form. Open up the students' ideas on form a little bit. I plan to declare, for instance, that Jane Hirshfield invented a form in her "Poem with Two Endings."