November Suite

I’m in the middle of an exercise to write a poem a day for November – the resulting collection, once edited, will be called ‘November Suite’. I am using various exercises to generate material. For example, I take the last line of the previous poem and google that phrase. Then I follow the links and harvest phrases and words from the pages that I find, using the material which this produces to steer the sense of the poem. 

The following poem was created using a phrase which I stumbled across – this became the title of the poem and was then put through google. This is an early draft, but I like the direction it follows:

The Voice of Wittgenstein

 “After several attempts to weld my results together
The best I could write would never be more
Than philosophical remarks

My thoughts would soon be crippled
If I tried to force them on
Against their inclination”

An anti-systematic attitude
Like John Cage’s music or Stockhausen
A permanent condition

Numbered aphorisms, as though
The world of existence could be reduced
To a set of interwoven statements

 Everything succumbing to the power of language
Different voices in dialogue
The first of the post-modernists

 Voice 1, then Voice of Tradition
Voice of Perplexity
And the Voice of Clarity

 These voices are inside my head
All at once, they seize language
Mess with it, precise but dissective

Taking objects and making of them
A contradiction, a complexity
Confusion that removes sense of self

Uttering a word, a phrase – I love you
Lost in translation, in perplexity
A permanent condition.

[20:30]