When, as the famous anecdote has it, the painter Degas told the poet Mallarmé that he had good ideas for poems but couldn’t find the right words, the latter responded, “It is not with ideas, my dear Degas, that one makes poems. It is with words.”

Little interests me less than the attempt to situate one’s ego with a calculation of the right side of history. Much more appealing is Keats’ formulation that “the poetical Character…has no self…It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet.”

In order to thwart my own “irritable reaching after fact & reason” and give equal weight to a plenitude of voices, I used the mode of conceptual writing which “employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts.” Specifically, I took the first line from each poem on the first page of today’s posts. Then I added further constraints on the assemblage to avoid representationalism: I used a randomizer to order and overlap the lines and a counter to make the breaks.

The result is words about words and an agnostic stance toward the historical.

bite us darkest days

                        55 years ago a squatter lives

in my day and they

                        were all american men

only 4 i saw the bear

                        warning i wonder what it was

like on the on day

                        seventy-nine of delirium

six decades and five years

                        ago missing sacks of grain

for sale polar bear of stone

                        i once saw a historian

tell those blessed

                        government missionaries

i forever house with wood

                        paneling how he didn’t know

what lay ahead she

                        shoulders the sea i hope

you are well the clock

                        stopped at 913 plane some

were building bunkers

                        to brace for the melting

a play stood by her

                        beliefs your majesty i present

my african findings

                        today murdered indigenous

woman i wonder often

                        what it was like

a heart was sixteen

                        at a competition in virginia

history comes back

                        to shut down in the practice

session of which i think

                        of my daughter is singing