glengarry renglosa 8

Houses splinter to the ground,
Yeats visits your kitchen, then
eggs wind down, the yolk cannot hold.

Inside is yellow scrambled goodness. The game done
and only the hard-boiled left spinning.

Both hands starting to sweat,
the muscles in your forearms
slackening like snakes in fall,

or the noose of mistaken identity...
One line is missing, Prospero.

line one from Charles Tomlinson’s “Two Views of 2 Ghost Towns”
line ten from W.H. Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror”



The renglosa form is a hybrid of several elements: The renga, which is a kind of group meditation form where, in this case, four writers take turns writing sequences of two or three lines using only the last writer's preceding line as a starting point... a variation on the exquisite corpse form surrealists worked with. Our particular spin was the genetic splicing of the renga with the glosa, which uses lines from other works as a beginning point (and in our variation an ending point as well). The final element was a kind of alcohol induced euphoria as we toiled away in one of our favourite bars. The sources quoted are referred to at the end of each renglosa; CWH is, in fact, the Canadian Writer's Handbook. Enjoy.


Connected areas:
Paul Dechene: There is no... Eric Hill: Slow Dance
Andy Weaver: Abstract... Steve McOrmond: View from...
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Last update: 1997/04/27