Book Spine Poetry

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Reporter:  Why don’t you write the way you talk?
Gertrude Stein:  Why don’t you read the way I write?

What follows are poems I did not write. They are poems I found. Like art made of found objects. I lined up the spines of various books in my library, across all genres. Some of them are page turners; a few “how to’s”, long novels, short prose, story collections. Just to see what happens when you change your vantage point, I mixed, arranged and shuffled books about, letting the titles tell their own story in the shape of a poem. 


There is no right way.   There is no single narrative.  Just an arbitrary collection, a literary remix.


Forbidden flowers
middlesex stirring 
the mud,
welcome to the 
monkey house, disturbances
 in the field.

 

 

Our bodies, ourselves
animal-speak dancing
with Life
Wisdom of the body moving, coming
To our senses

speak, children of the wolf
all the powerful, invisible things
How it is, out
stealing horses

Broken for you,
housekeeping. The moon
 is a harsh mistress, the rest
of her life, until
death
do us part
The joy of being, the untethered
soul
how we believe genocide
of the mind,
the compass inside ourselves,
zen.
revolutionary road, a map
of the world
everything is illuminated, the spirit
catches you, and
you fall down.
*This literary remix experiment 
was inspired by artist  Nina Katchadourian 

0 thoughts on “Book Spine Poetry”

  1. No comments?????????!! Wow! How can one not? Bazaar…as one would think…but even more bazaar is that your book collection is able to do that (with a little help from you, of course). hhhmmmmm…;)

  2. This is a most beautiful poem, Monica. I shivered with delight reading some of the lines. "Loading mercury with a pitchfork". Even that, somehow seems filled with great meaning. Happy Thanksgiving up there in the North.

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Welcome to the creative playground of Image, Sculpture, Verse.  I live in a river town nestled in the Chugach Mountain Range of Southcentral Alaska.

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