Sometimes, I play games and make poems out of those games.
So what I don't know quite what to do,
I look around to invent a game in order to write.
On this occasion, on my coffee table in the living room
was an edition of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
And I thought, well, it might be interesting to write
a poem based on words that I would find in Mrs Dalloway.
And so I tried it.
And sometimes, I would go several pages
before finding the next word, and in that way,
both use the novel as a watermark behind the poem
but wrote a poem of my own thinking
out of what Virginia Woolf had done.
So when I was finished, and it still wasn't time for lunch,
I thought, well, now what?
And I thought, well, maybe do that again.
So I looked, and the book was 300 pages.
And this first poem had taken 50 pages.
So I thought, well, if I keep doing this,
I would have six poems, and that would represent
the whole of the novel.
And that would also be a constraint.
So the poem would have to end, and I
would have to always anticipate making the poem end
and resolving it in some way before I got to page 50.
So I'm going to read two of those poems.
And the first one represents the pages 200 to 250.
It's called "Opened and Shut."
"She had prepared a looking glass, hair, dress, thought,
sofa, in the glow of dog's barking, beautifully close-up
and once flames eating the edge of the sofa.
Her eyelashes blurred.
Chin, nose, forehead, some lips, the cheek,
the glass looking first at one thing than another.
Nose, eyes, evening.
She sat looking at the map of her hands, the window,
the clock, her pulse.
The body was busy thinking, conjuring
the museum of a moment, emotion, scenes, people,
bags of treasures, heaps of theories.
Theories to explain feeling 'the here' and the back of the hand.
A theory allowed one thing after another.
First dinner, then mourning.
Her hand was the world.
To get to it, she had to look at herself.
To get at the truth, one would have
to disregard anything false.
Yet, the truth was intangible.
One eye on the horizon, a long indeterminable mere
straightness, a few plants, that indescribable purple,
doors being opened, visual impressions,
as if the eye were the brain.
The body entering the house."