Poetry Telephone Complete!

[Truerenigma]

Maybe the joke, but not the game - he did a fine thing organizing it for us.

[Gwyneth]

1. Regarding content: It appeared that not everyone was playing by the same rules, and I know I was uncertain exactly as to what they were, so I took my cue from the game itself, where you repeat what you heard with the idea that it will become somewhat muddled in the telling, but you don't just take the last telling as a springboard for a completely different story as did the one that followed me.
(snipped)
Oh yeah, I just wanted to point out I followed a guy who opened in German, paraphrasing a play/opera (forgot now what it was) that had been written in German. I got the message it was my time about four hours before my time was up (or so I remember it). First I had to go find out about this piece by Strauss that I had never heard of, mainly because what the guy wrote made little sense to me, and even though I can read a little German, the quote left me clueless. Then after doing all of that I had to write a poem that mimicked this other "poem". After that I see the person after me wrote something that basically had nothing to do with what I had written. Was I a little pissed...

Dale

Hi Dale,

Apologies for playing by different rules. I did what we had done before in Poetry Telephones on aapc (which is where 'milo' got the idea) each participant using the previous piece as a stepping stone to their own piece.

My reasoning is that I want to write poetry, not play a word game. I've always understood that any challenge on aapc was intended to inspire the writing of as good a poem as was possible. (Or perhaps more accurately, a draft that can be worked on to become a good poem.) For me, the Telephone isn't a question of competing with the others in the chain - we all have different raw materials, after all. Instead it's about competing with myself to do as well as I can and write something worthwhile. Since other people are waiting for me to respond I can't dither like I usually do.

When I first looked at your poem, I had no idea what to do. Then I thought about how odd it was to find Salome and John the Baptist juxtaposed with pork products; this made me think of the Museo de Jamón (the "Ham Museum" chain of bars in Spain), and the only person I've ever met called Salome, who happened to be a barmaid (not there, but in another Spanish bar)... There had to be a guy called John who'd lost his head as that's the image I recall from the Bible story - John the Baptist's head on a charger - and your poem was about a lack of reaction to the 'courtship'...

I did use other elements of your piece, but had to throw away a whole section as the time constraint meant I needed to hack and burn: the piece I started to write was far more ambitious.

It might be interesting to see what would happen if we all started from the same piece and wrote a reaction to it: we'd all bring our own cultural biases and associations, as well as our own skills and writing preferences, and no doubt end up with very different results/interpretations.

I think Horatio/milo took a risk trying to combine two such different groups, but I'm glad he did as I have the drafts of two standalone poems, both triggered by your piece, for which I am grateful; I'm sorry you were disappointed by the final results.

g.