A Daily Glance
Gregory Betts' The Others Raisd in Me is a "plunderverse project." In it Betts takes Shakespeare's Sonnet 150 and makes 150 cross outs poems from it based on the individual lines of the poem. In the introduction, Betts tells us that he is re-imagining Shakespeare's piece as a "prophetic program for the centuries of Western culture from his time through our future doom." While that makes for an interesting idea, the pieces of the book are excellent on their own without attempting to read a narrative. For example, number "9":
we are not
made of words
tho we is
Or, take number "37":
when i say
me
i mean
how i made it
here
a metonymy
of thee
Betts' project is fascinating since it comments on the way that we read other authors and the way they influence us or we influence their works through reading/rewriting them.
Comments