==[piecemeal poems from Spring 2024]==

As part of this website project, I wanted it to be a place to centrally have most of my art that I've been doing since getting back into it, so below is a largely non-ordered archive of the poems I wrote prior to starting the salvage poetry project I'm still undertaking.

The "untitled alphabetic" poems were composed using some magnetic letters I found on a whiteboard in one of my classes.

The "cat's cradle;" and "station eleven;" poems were composed using words pruned from the respective texts (Cat's Cradleby Kurt Vonnegut and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel). These texts had been assigned as [] reading for a Senior seminar English class I was in at the time (on Apocalyse literature). I couldn't get into either of them that much (though I read bits of both of their beginnings). To supplant a lack of class participation (while still engaging with the texts), I pursued the process of writing these poems.

The following is what I wrote to describe the text and context of these poems when I submitted them to a literary magazine last year:

"Each poem / poem collection is something of a collage from two of the books we read in my Apocalypse class. That is, each line in each poem / sub-poem is made only of words pulled from semi-randomly chosen paragraphs from semi-randomly chosen pages. Each stanza will be pulling lines from the same page in the book and each line will be pulling words from the same paragraph. For Cat's Cradle, I did a semi-random selection of the available paragraphs on the given page when choosing which paragraph to write lines from. For Station Eleven, I used every paragraph on the chosen page, going sequentially from top to bottom.

"I say all of this to explain both what you are looking at and why the names of the poems / sub-poems are formatted the way that they are. The names for the Station Eleven poems / sub-poems indicate which page I am pulling that poem / sub-poem from. The names for Cat's Cradle are a little bit more complex. The format for these corresponds to an alphanumeric key: A / a = 1 ; B / b = 2 ; etc. The uppercase letter will indicate which page the stanza is pulling from and the lowercase letters indicate which number paragraphs from that page are being used. The one complication here is that the uppercase letters have an additional level of translation at work. The decoded numeric digits correspond to which number of the Fibonacci sequence the page is. (I'm starting with n=1, not n=0). This doesn't matter that much, being used mostly as a way for me to get a varied range of numbers that span from 1 2 and 3 digits.

"Although I have split pages into different poems, I think the poems for each book function well enough as single, concatenated poems (that is, one poem for each book). With that said, again, you can choose to format the poems however you want. You can choose to swap around any of the poems / sub-poems / stanzas too. Similarly, I leave it to you to include / exclude any of the poems / sub-poems, I readily realize that what I have thrown at you has ended up quite lengthy."
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