Preliminary thoughts on the Combine Poem

In some posts about my improv practice from earlier in 2011: one on the emitter and another on sound poetry, I made certain suggestions which in retrospect seem to have pointed forward to the Combine though I had yet to imagine it myself. Looking back at those postings now I also see additional ideas that I might bring into the Combine going forward. But, that said, what served as the catalyst for the Combine was a note I made in a file called "poem ideas" which lives semi-perpetually on the desktop of my computer (while now and then being discarded or emerging again, with a new name).

Anyway, that note read simply; "repetition based thing i did a week or so back" underneath which I placed a short list of words

• piles
• trails
• feathers
• plangent
• antipodal
• huff
• forbear
• asymptotic 

… the moment a week or so before was not an APG meeting. I was thinking back to playing with words, aloud, scatting to a degree while home alone. It stayed on my mind and so I wrote the note later with this list as a record of the words that I generated. The first recording of anything in this mode is from the November 9, 2011 APG meeting & listed as "Stalactite improv" - these things, shall I just call them repeaters?

But, in any event before doing any of them again as solitary exercises (as emitters were intended initially) the idea of the Combine Poem came to me. Nothing grandly conceptual about it. & yes, in light of the current year's Poetry Resolution, the name is stolen from Rauschenberg (and that works for me in other ways too). So then a Combine Poem is what?

It can contain emitters and repeaters, could also embed what I might otherwise have called an "improv sonnet", various modalities of sound poetry might be included etc, in short - whatever. I imagined it as operating under a number of regimes or modes or procedures or tints and that I would shift between them as needed. Thus my need to work back through those earlier posts that I linked to above as both contain elaborate listings of other potential avenues which might funnel into the Combine.

So far there have been three of them.

Combine Poem No. 1 - Black radishes are just as white on the inside

Combine Poem No. 2 - Dissociative

Combine Poem No. 3 - Rip it open and eat the flesh

…which is my first ever video poem.

I'm interested in both a drift in the Combine where transitions between sub-routines are gradual and a total lack of drift, where they are cuts, abrupt, startling. But in either case I am still missing something with 1-3, as much as they are pointing generally in the direction I want to go for awhile. I think what they are missing is a lattice (as metadata) - which dims the improv aspect to a small degree, though I do not expect it will squash it totally.

Stay tuned to see if that last idea takes wings.