I’m thrilled to share the OTSCP with the esteemed LA-based poet, Joshua Corwin for his series “Assiduous Dust”.
Assiduous Dust is the home of the On-the-Spot Collaborative Poem (OTSCP), a novel form of collaborative poetry where the featured poet and Joshua Corwin take turns in reading out phrases or individual words from lines randomly from their selection of books during the interview. The process of OTSCP promotes other authors’ work in an engaging collaborative bundle of spontaneity. According to Joshua, this technique is a variant of William S. Burroughs’ cut-up method, but combined with exquisite corpse, and grooviness–something he thinks would benefit us all. (Perhaps, he’s right!)
Adhering to the principle that lineation, indentation, spacing and punctuation are inescapably inseparable from a poem’s content, Joshua compiles the OTSCP and sends it as a ‘party-favor’ to his guest for being on the show–a poetic ‘thank you’ for sharing their words and wisdom with the world.
I was interviewed for Assiduous Dust 11½ (Episode 11½, Season 1 of this intriguing poetry podcast), which will be out in tandem with the LA-based award-winning poet, Mike Sonksen.
MEGHA SOOD BOOKS OUT:
- Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds
- Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf
- Gregory Orr, A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry
JOSHUA CORWIN BOOKS OUT:
- Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition, pp. 70-1 (last page of “Letters in November” and “Amnesiac”)
- Hazarat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Sound and Music: The Sufi Teaching of Hazarat Inayat Khan, 1998-99
- Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, pp. 254-55
- Anne Waldman (editor), The Beat Book: Poems & Fiction from the Beat Generation, pp. 248-49 (Joanne Kyger, from The Japan and India Journals, 1960–1964)
Here is the Full Poem as the result of the OTSCP
Listen, Faithful Silence ( Title)
Brilliant dime-size raptures
petaling off him
are dreaming
across my body.
Imagine land, finer. Much finer
Seas who most ably
Unmon Zen.
Kumba Mela Zen.
Escher Zen.
Rooms, spiritless as any prince
Faithful work of drowning.
They will see him
Struggling to be free
gives itself permission…
Red wife, a minute of worms,
of another he throws
thinks
life is larger than
a thought
in Sufi terms
no one can
call perception a masterpiece, questioning
delights
in the picture, into Hardwar.
The sickle from their chest
Seams
open themselves to the wild,
now my blood between his ribs
how easily a boy
in a dress
of a youth in porcelain faith.
If words are ism, the fate unasks
naturally, logically
carried
the Way,
the size
of old place,
of the Mind
of stockroom buddhas
for It, a catastrophe of joints
This I kept the housefly
tied to string
tied to a lamp
as if
their swords, there is no reward.
What station is the static on?
Something neither I nor you.
Who can say? the curious kōan offers begging.
Offers no journeying
continues automatic.
It continues a breath to the sun,
Turns muwakkals to accomplish gloomy buddhas,
to accomplish this path,
their English hands swimming brahman Jain asanas
Puddles I am soaking in which came
room spiritless, an agile brute
who held the knife is gone.
In the back of his throat, a flash
a white asterisk.
Storm clouds, skies, bursting into sea
like skirts of bruises.
It goes on. We wring a whole universe.
Never dared another color
off their brother,
nursed grey
deaf-action-water
on the ground.
Open itself to the wild,
now my blood is drying on the pillow.
This belly full of blades and roots
as if dancing could stop the heart.
Through a drench into scaffolding skies,
storm clouds across my body: a universe.
Guided beginning, shawl lingers, sleeping Shiva.
Says monasteries discussing,
posing Absurd Given
in the spirit of Holism,
in the spirit of Space;
the fluid incomparably more continuous
than any Kingdom of Thought.
I do my pillar of fuzz, my damp
Let us.
Listen to me, faithful silence.
Somehow, we’ve become strangers.
A green life is blue death.
A beginning birth,
beginning universe.
You tear into a body and come out
with a fistful of the exact feathers,
seemed cast in lapis and spinning light
inside him this horse with
this human face
beneath the sound of his own
But a concrete night stands
bursting with sleep.
Tipped over a New God
Tipped over a New Death
No pervading
only a little barren
One can think about
the pebble of man,
of wife
of a sigh,
as four beautiful, blank, logical
Master
breaks the mind of fields
of fervent buddhas.
The need to comfort anyone else
to pull the sickle from the chest,
pulling a thorn from the eye of a dog
into hooks
as he twirls his horse-head shadow
on the family.
The only thing that breathes is me.
Joshua Corwin and Megha Sood © 2020
“Listen to me, faithful silence”
This line landed inside me. Thank you.
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Aww thanks so much dear.Its a big collaborative poem but do give it a read
It’s a new form of found poetry invented by a LA based poer
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Reblogged this on The Reluctant Poet.
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Thanks so much
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Always an honor and a pleasure to have followers read your great writing, Megha!!
xoxo
😁💕🌹✨
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