july 23/RUN

3.8 miles
river road, north/south
76 degrees
humidity: 70% / dew point: 67
7:45 am

Hot and steamy this morning. As I left the house and walked down my block, I could hear lots of birds. At some point, not sure if it was because they stopped singing, or I stopped listening, I couldn’t hear them anymore.

10 Thing I Noticed

  1. the light reflecting off of the river, blinding and bright
  2. a male coxswain’s voice drifting up from below
  3. at least 2, maybe 3, big groups of runners
  4. a water station set-up for some event — a marathon training run?
  5. a runner ahead of me in a bright yellow shirt
  6. bikers, but no roller skiers
  7. a little white dog with its human, stopping to poop
  8. a few bugs on my shoulders, but no bites
  9. white flowers under the trestle
  10. something approaching from behind, sounding like a saw. I thought it was an eplitigo, but it was a fat tire, blasting music — was it the music that made it sound like a saw? I couldn’t tell.

This sounds like a fun experiment to try:

One way you might achieve a similar effect in your own poetry is through the cut-up method I’ve described. If you have a few less-than-wonderful drafts, try splicing them together. In a way, it’s like braiding hair: You pull a line from here and a line from there, weaving them together until you have created a more complex structure than what you had to begin with. If your original two drafts are on the same subject, they may fit organically together to form a new poem. But it’s especially interesting if the original poems are very different from each other. You’ll likely have to weave in new thoughts too. For those of you who keep a file of evocative fragments, as I recommended in my first craft capsule, that file would be a good source to consult for a project like this.

Make it Strange/ Lauren Camp