Second Look: Lodestone Crossing

tyunglebower ♦ July 4, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

It’s a long book of poetry. Experimental poetry. An oddity to end this series of looking back on my books, but such was the chronology.

Lodestone Crossing Is a long poem broken into smaller chapters, derived from several sessions of “blackout” poetry. It’s a process wherein one takes a preexisting text, and removes (or blacks out) words, so that the remaining words form the new piece. I played around with it a few summers ago, and became fascinated by the process, so I opted to make a full length intentional book of it.

This single volume consists of my “black outs” fro from different sources. Old magazines from the 50’s, a right wing religious advice book, a book about shoes, and one or two other things.

There is a lose running theme throughout the piece, but it’s mostly a”prose poem” as they say.

I don’t think most of it would make for good “slam”poetry, but that is closest analogy I have to the result. My goal was to create not only correct sentences, but to make the inevitably awkward diction of some sections into poetry itself. As much as the words and the meanings matter, with this project I paid particular attention, sometimes all the attention, to how the sentence sounded out loud.

You learn about language when you do this, on both a broad, official scale, and one’s own personal language preferences and tendencies. A real emphasis on the particular powers of a given part of speech.

The cover is an old archival photo of a lodestone, (a naturally magnetic rock) picking up some nails. I thought this is sort of what black out poetry does. You wave your perception over something, and the “more valuable” components stick to it. Hence the title, Lodestone Crossing.

I will say that in this volume, I insisted on not only holding on to the word order, but to the punctuation of the original source. I could not end a sentence in the poem, unless I had a word in the original source that was followed by a period. Extra constrained.

I have since this experiment completed, but not yet typed a second, much longer “epic” length blackout poem. This second one is the result of a single enormous Right wing religious commentary I picked up at an old book store. In that, I did not constrain myself with punctuation–only word choice and order. I haven idea when that might be available; I mention it here only to emphasize how uncommon such a project is for me. Two, lifetime.

Look, I understand poetry as a whole is a hard sell in our society, and particularly poetry of this kind. I did this mostly for my own enjoyment, which I then wanted to share with anyone else who enjoys playing around with language without the constraints of standard English communication. (This kind of poetry is also sometimes known as “constrained writing.”) It’s for language lovers, or Ty lovers, and probably not many others.

Do I think that it can be enjoyed on its own? Yes, with an open mind one could, or else I would not have made it available for download. But because it is super niche, I realize it will likely remain an obscure piece even for me.

It’s a dollar.

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This concludes my Second Look series. I’ve enjoyed looking back on my entire catalog, and sharing a few extras about each book with you. I hope I have convinced you to try some of them if not all of them. Selling is not an easy endeavor for folks such as myself. It’s particular difficult for my mind to condense everything good about my writing into one sentence of 30 seconds of talking. I do it because the system says I have to, but it felt good to talk for as long as I wanted about each book as I came to it. How I wish all marketing were that open and patient.