Accidental poetry

One of my (few) Christmas presents this year came from far across the seas, from my dear pen-pal Kate in Buffalo, NY. It was a 'Magnetic Poetry' set. More specifically, it was a 'Haiku Edition' of 'Magnetic Poetry'.

I used to have one of these on my fridge door once before (not the haiku version, though), when I was living in Toronto several years ago. I found then, as I am finding now, that I am reluctant to break up the sequences that the words are joined together in when you first take them out of the box. These often seem far more mystical and allusive than any new word combinations I might labour to produce.

The blocks of words are full of fortuitous phrases like 'mushroom morning', 'evening whisper', 'trickle breath', and 'almost cicada dream'. I particularly like the 'flower happy garden'.

Occasionally the sequences even seem to hold at least the germ of a complete short poem - if we allow a Manley Hopkins abandon in forging novel compound nouns, a cummings-ish fracturing of conventional grammar.

I like:

sleep creaks while a small laugh smiles

And:

some were from soon

And:

through autumn window
thought thunder
before always

And:

can but
say too
life live

And:

like full
him how
fall why

And:

dawn weeds leave night
sun sees a sad dog

And:

dead hard
only they want wind

Or this:

wander, harvest woman
snow after
later, field child early
more must soon
here, there come

...... sounds like the synopsis of a Thomas Hardy novel!


My current favourite, though, is this:

face wild song
look blue
still hear

How dare I tamper with such serendipitous beauty?