Response mode: Taking everything and the genre

This hybrid paper of creative and critical writing reflects on my explorations of poetry. I write in what I call ‘response mode’, which is a group of behaviours, beginning with impersonation, and also open to understandings gained from other art forms. After studying the style and techniques of other poets, I move towards a mid-point between another poet’s voice and my own, effectively, a new, hybrid voice. The engagement with literary ancestors enables evolution towards an expression that is more fully my own. Stealing the designations of genre ensures a continued experiment. The challenges and variety of voicings made possible by prose poetry and haibun are important. The haibun influences other new hybrid forms, which encompass found poetry and appropriate language in a way which is redolent of the times. We take from exhibitions, songs, film, poems, conversation. Poets eavesdrop; I do it on the bus. If there is stealing, it is on a spectrum, which includes intertext. My poems draw from Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yunna Moritz and Alan Loney, and from sculptor Cori Beardsley, who suggest to me fresh possibilities.