Sometimes I will rewrite a poem from scratch over and over until I think I have come up with something. Often, I come up with nothing, and I abandon the piece. I abandoned the following piece(s), but I enjoyed the process. The following are a response to a poem about stone arrangements like Stonehenge in the U.K. I will leave the poet I’m responding to unnamed. It was not an especially good poem, and these are not especially good responses.
1.
in looking at stones,
you imagine a story
of the gods, of the
overwhelming sense
of the sacred they evoke,
assuming it rests in
the stones and not
in you.
2.
the stones, you say,
are sacred, but
they are just stones,
while you, poet, friend,
are a creator
looking for redemption.
3.
you hold a stone,
turning it in your hand,
trying to figure out
how it came to be,
seeing in it shapes,
potential places
it could be.
4.
poet,
fuck you and your stones,
you and your smug
academic lines.
the stones stand beyond you,
if they stand, and you,
with your alliteration
and scattered diphthongs,
will die.
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