from "variations: plunder verse"*

Barry McKinnon's "pages from a prairie journal," variation two

or is it my imagination

stillness, before lemons
at the country store

the dust settled, clinging
to the fine hairs

given to me
, a mistake

when i was in love
i was in love

you could tell
by the way i hid

trees
into guitars and birds

distinction before rain
and confectionaries

this museum of skulls
and sex

like alien dust

Barry McKinnon's "pages from a prairie journal," variation three

this country is dying
with the sureness

of history; a block of houses

the renunciation of boyhood,
of manhood

when curtains settled; how
can i love

is it the lemon juice, my
strong name, house, given

to me a mistake

you can tell, by the way

with the distinction of pride
and grandmothers

i have no symbol

as curtains; nameless

*a brief note on variations: plunder verse
rob mclennan

The poems that make up the manuscript variations: plunder verse, book three of the other side of the mouth, came out of a conversation with Toronto poet Gregory Betts, during a visit he made to Ottawa, as the two of us sat at Pubwell's Restaurant on Preston Street in Ottawa and talked about a project he was working on, that he called "plunder verse." To write a poem using only the words from someone else's poem, and only in that order. He had already done it a couple of times, with pieces that appeared in the Calgary journal filling Station. The result of that conversation was that he would write up his concept for us to consider for the subsequent issue of our online journal Poetics.ca.

I've been working for some time on a series of more deliberate works as "response" texts. Robert Kroetsch has said that writing is a conversation. David W. McFadden said once that books come from books. In previous collections, I've written pieces that have come, slyly, out of other works. Why not push it more deliberately? The poems in my own variations: plunder verse work more than poems based on other poems. It is one thing to write a poem based on a longer poem by Barry McKinnon, but what about writing five pieces from that? Or fifteen? The challenge, then, was to write pieces that could live by themselves, but still be completely different from each other. I've picked a number of texts by Canadian poets (including Meredith Quartermain, bpNichol, Rob Budde, George Bowering, meghan jackson, Lisa Robertson, Mark Cochrane and Michael Holmes), one per author, to plunder, writing my own poem within theirs; my rule, I can only use the words in the original poem, and only use them in the order in which they appear in the original text. I can neither add nor re-order. For me, the interesting thing isn't whether or not I can write one successful poem out of another one, but if I can write five, or fifteen successful poems out of a singular text, trying to make them different enough and interesting enough that they are worth looking at side by side.

What becomes interesting through the process of "plunder" is seeing the threads that emerge through the original piece, stripped away to reveal something new within the piece, put there deliberately or otherwise, and even contradict the original poem, all the time while using the original flesh of the poem to rebuild. It has become something new.