A Lesson From Poetry Class
I took a college level poetry class last spring and my professor told us about radical revisions. Not something as simple as changing a verb or adding adjectives, but fully changing the poem to be something new, while keeping the idea of the original. One radical revision was translating it into 3 different languages and then back to your original language. Here’s how it turned out:
She got too?
Louder and tree branches heavy snow in the winter diameter of the tree;
We, too, that I may cut down even to the dregs, and we will draw it into the wood of the grove,
Tiny little too high for a rapid way it divides up a small area of Fig.
Why, what else hath taken hold on equal terms?
Full of dreams, and the depth of winter, it was the excessive ambition, burst in the midst of great vows,
The dream: building the world I am the center of the root
A bright hope his pride branches to shrivel
He was at that time, there is nothing more conducive to this art, it is false.
Dream was put into a receptacle deported
And she rose up in the trash in another, and another when he got the full
A lot of small dreams are blown by the wind.
She got too?
At least not with me
not yet
Some parts are nonsense but I still like it
