Poetry Month Prompt #22
April 22:
- Select two or more songs from the current top 40 listings, or the songs you listen to most of whatever service you use.
- Consult the lyrics of each song (most can be found via simple web search).
- Select words/phrases to create a new poem that: is distinguishable from your source material, differing in composition, tone, and subject matter, combines two or more song texts, and does not read like song lyrics.
From the Muse library: Song & Error: Poems by Averill Curdy. A lush, lyrical debut from a vibrant new poetic voice: A sparrow like a “fumbled punch line” is lost in an airport; a man translating Ovid is transfigured by witnessing a massacre in Jamestown in 1621; a woman smiles seductively as the skin on her back is opened out like a wing; a lizard upon a laptop shimmers with the true life, primitive and binary, of our modern information age. In the sonically rich, formally restless poems of this debut collection, Song & Error, the thread that unravels all we think we know of the world is plucked loose and drawn from a seal’s beached corpse. Uniting past and present, history and autobiography, Averill Curdy’s poems strive to endure within “the crease of transformation” and to speak–sing–of that terrible beauty.