The year in a poem: working practices

I submitted a longish poem called "January" for the poetry and poetics research group on monday. The poem was constructed of four initial sections relating to news items or photgraphs from the month, plus one constructed of seasonal haiku which were then run together and edited into the simple form the other four took. The intention behind this was to have five uncluttered and simple source texts to then evolve or mutate the poem according to various practices (be it anagram, antonymy, lipogram or some of my own devising which I have no intention to give away just yet). The poem consists of three "files" or levels of mutation. File one being the orginal texts (though this was to some extent already mediated by initial editing), file two being the first treatments and file three consisting of further treatments applied to file two. The final results were then written through; so although the initial treatments adhered to strict constraints, these were to some extent smoothed out by the process of writing through (e.g. a text mutated by lipogram in e may have been intruded upon by one which didn't adhere to that particular). I propose applying these procedures to each month of the year this year, thus having a poetic record of the year (though as will be seen, the final product may well bear little recognitive value as regards actual events. I think you'll just have to file that under poetic license, and lump it). The first poem of the year is, obviously:

January

Four figures lined and
sat looking at ground to
the side from
under blue peaks
eyes narrowed at
an outline
no detail the
tree-line phased
sun dips below
too-close horizon
the idea
of a rifle keeping
close watch on
this cat that is
heading right for us
head low to the road
coming out
of the picture
coming right out of the picture
there has been
an imposition, a
disturbance the
route interrupted and
all that’s left are shapes
a polygon a
yellow-jacketed man
dissolving in sympathy
a window with
dimmer light
promising everything
the lack
of mammalian noise
a blockage of
inanimate air an
intimation of bones
the quartered numbers
scored and
tested seem
somehow to be powdered
as a group
from the filthy highs
they look, constantly
this morphine myth
is in a sense retail, he
opined, raising
a gun, stopping
the flow
of her gossipy
morose orisons
he told her
baby the ingestion’s
just a trifle
a sleeping-dose botched,
so you’ve won
and that dog was disappearing
tail high
going into the picture
going
right into the picture
towards an
escapologist tree-line
there could be a conjunction but
here was there
a slight opinion all
bifurcated
a cold, used item rued
an awl, a clear escape
poor man
he only asked her what
is original
a door of bright depth
withholding nothing?
a surfeit
of mineral commotion?
and then the pathways are cleared
of animate, jigging wind and
the impossibility of
the quire,
the retired numb roses
the sacred node
a test, do some
to be pawed, to be raided
the self-same repeated hewing
so grip it
firm it up
ok? can you not see that
the myth about
morphine is that
it’s retail
he stopped her
gossip told her
scansion
was trifling, enough
to send him to sleep
of death, thinking
that that dog
was vanishing
tail high
going into the photo
going right
into the photo towards a stand of Houdini-oak
possibly a junction but
we smile, here he rates
light, lain a loop
a cut fibre a
decryption, an arcing
dhow hails aloud,
a demarcation asks,
pleads hear
we are one

Not another blog

Yes, another blog, though this is perhaps designed for a somewhat more esoteric audience than Coastalblog. The purpose of TAD is to provide an online document of my work on poetry and in the field of my own personal poetics. Coastalblog, what with the nigh on constant stream of bad jokes and occasional commentary on the banal is perhaps not the best forum to go discussing poetry and my working practices thereof, so I'm hiving them off here. Hopefully it will become a forum for productive discussion, even if not that then it will serve to provide me with an invaluable resource to track the evolution of my poetics. So here we go then. Another blog. Welcome.