A sonnet that begins with words yanked, one from each line of “returning the books to their shelves” by Bernadette Mayer.

city
time        
19         
stream
taxi
it
mulch
then
window
nothing
books
cold
phone
shelves

I finished reading the 25th anniversary edition of Bernadette Mayer’s wonderful Sonnets (Tender Buttons Press, 2014) while we were anchored in Desolation Sound. Despite their distance from where I was, Mayer’s urban words and images suffused my dreams, and I tapped away at her lines, trying to understand how they fit together. One of Mayer’s projects in particular, undertaken with Philip Good, struck me: a list of fourteen words finds its way into a sonnet, one word per line (66). I decided I would try to co-compose with Meyer, by pulling words from another of her pieces that I love very much, a love sonnet entitled “returning the books to their shelves” (67). But as soon as I decided on this method and pulled the words from Mayer’s poem, I thought, I can’t make a poem from these words! I’m north of 50 degrees north latitude–what have I to do with cities, time, taxis, windows, phones or shelves? But then when I let the poem begin with that dilemma, the rest followed: I found that being where I am lets me empty these words of their ordinary contexts and make other associations. Evidently, the neighbourhood is everything, no matter where you are.

First published  in http://visiblepoetry.blogspot.com/2015/06/another-kind-of-wildness.html