Eight Books and a Side Project

Starting to work on my next eight (!) books, the titles for which appeared in a dream.

Admittedly, I forgot five of the titles upon waking up. “One of them seemed like a female, a name or character,” I jotted down.

Three I remember pretty clearly. One was something like “Pelage.” Another, The Roman Knife (or Night?). The last contained a word like vega, verde, verdigris…Vegas.…

I have my work cut out for me on those, as dream titles might only symbolize actual titles. Currently I’m reading in preparation for a pelagic project: depths, the deep, open ocean, rolling seas, The Waves.

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Meanwhile, I started a side-project, which contains another writing prompt:

The basic idea uses the theme of ‘escapement.’ An escapement is a clock part, and the word interests me because it’s slightly awkward. It’s as if someone new to English built a word using the ending “—ment,” intending to mean “escape,” without knowing they could skip "—ment" and just use escape. By escapement, they meant escape.

If clock produces ticks, words also tick, in rhythmic syllables. What if a syllable escapes, or a letter escapes? I started to play around with the idea of lost letters. 

I drafted poems with the following rules:

1. Start with a word. Remove a letter, so the remaining letters form another word. I may be a recognizable word or a plausible coined word.

2. Find the emotional link between those two words. What is the world like, now that (word A) has become (word B)? Ideally, your word pair will suggest a narrative or call up some emotional state. 

Use this step to weed out less productive pairs. “Slipshod” changing into “lipshod” is maybe more interesting than ‘book’ changing into ‘boo.’ (Or maybe not. It’s your call.)

3. Draft a poem relating the emotional narrative or exploring this new reality. Perhaps explore the tension of the lost link. Does lipshod vanquish the slipshod? At what cost? 

​4. Write one poem for each letter of the alphabet, so that all letters are permitted a chance to escape.