[New-Poetry] Backwards poetry

[David Graham]

Oh, we all get involved in backwardness sometimes, Hal!

Thanks, everyone, for the backwards suggestions.  Marvelous stuff, Tad &
Hal.  Also Rodney. . . .

If anyone can think of any more such poems, I'm all ears.  It's strange,
when I cooked up this exercise I assumed I'd be able to think of dozens of
contemporary poems that pull this little trick.  Couldn't.

Here's one of mine, though, an old one.

Maharg Divad 



Boys Backward And Forward
 
     "You take the language, I'll keep the fur"
                --from a dream
 
Let's roll this whole movie backwards
and see swimmers sucked along feet first
by their thrashing wakes, silly grins vanishing
under inverted splashes, then feet and legs
arcing up softly to the quivering board
where they'll bounce a bit, then retreat, retreat.
Where do they go, those glistening selves
tanned and dripping with their yawning summers?
Why are they climbing into cutoffs and T-shirts
with such eager faces?  Why would they scatter
backwards down the driveway on wobbly bikes?
 
Already the June leafage is draining away
into paler shades of May and April.
The last freak snowfall mushrooms over brown grass
before fluttering upward.  Soon we will reappear
clumsy-legged among snowbanks, catching snowballs
and disassembling them carefully back to our feet.
We'll be just faces now, peering out
from the hoods of our fur-lined parkas,
and everyone will be busy swallowing
cloud after cloud of indigestible words.
 
--David Graham.  Stutter Monk.  Flume Press, 1986.




On 9/24/08 9:59 AM, "Halvard Johnson" <halvard at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Well, this one involves some backwardsness:
> 
> THE GRASSY KNOLL
>  
> 
> --HJ
> 
> fr. Guide to the Tokyo Subway
>  
> 


====================================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/About%20Me.html

Poetry Library:
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