an accurate cigarette: poetry & prompts by Sarah Burgoyne (above/ground, 2026) has prompts and her responses to them.
I’ve been going through that, generating poems in this wild bit of heat and storm we find ourselves in, within a side of vertigo (to go soon I hope).
One of her prompts was take a rough draft and translate it. The overall theme of chapbook to keep in mind is “Add a warrior to it” as feedback she got once.
I searched files of poem drafts for July, and found an underwhelming poem in July 2021. Aha. A basic, I-am-bored-and-nothing-is-happening interstitial self-indulgent poem.
the white noise
between stations
of the b&w tv smaller
then a tablet screen
halfway between
two shows listening
to both. the snow
in mid-summer
a cooling focus
from the fly buzz
It’s been a while since I did homophonic translation. Machine translation is too good and too AI to be useful for adding the chaos factor but I can work more from ear.
So I then subject it to pretending what I’m hearing and transcribing sound by sound is a muffled French. See if I can “overhear” anything vivid.
des whitérite noix
et patin stations
odeur baver sur des evenements à smala
dans un tabletter screau
il y as un oui beton
tu as choisis… les quoi? tiens, et
deux boits. les nons
sont fais à midi, et ses meres
as culé, focus
pomme de poing, il s’est fait flinguer
Then I translate back to English and see if I can take this randomness and reassemble towards sense.
meteorites, beer-nuts and bench rest stations
we are tourists in our own lives. may as well order the Beavertail.
the scent of our tribe at events is sour as unwashed sheets,
skunk sunk into the skin. we hover each other’s shoulders like
dragonflies, protecting against deer flies that draw blood.
we drool over a tablet, its five-left-sealed apocalypse.
we fall to kiss the ground as if it were a yes in concrete
as if bumps on manhole covers were nipples of a Celtic king
to suck and pledge our fealty.you chose yours, and drinks for two others.
the nos will come at noon with our mother’s dead-end focus.
an apple of a gist will get thrown. tossed back until it is brown pieces.
the tempting trees are sure they are tornado’s match.
So now although it is language-as-material-based content, it feels more distinctive and alive than the original. We have multiple people and interaction instead of poet-is-solitude-trope. We have particulars and actions. We have relationships to the world and to each other. It is less predictable. You don’t know where the poem is going when you start any given line. It travels. It is more of a wake up exercise but it pleases me now.