Is there Only Forward?
Amanda Zalud

Maybe they’d told the Neighborhood I was dead.

It’s an odd kind of relationship,
but then
what isn’t?
“You’re fine.”
Your journey will be free,
with no cash or credit transaction involved.

Let me put it this way.
There was still nothing to see,
But I knew it was coming.
Whoever
was on the other end
clearly didn’t know how I felt,
wasn’t empathizing very well.
But have I got a life?
I have hidden depths.
I can look like a person who belongs.
That’s not what the feeling had been about.

I told you
things would start happening.
After all,
I had known about it
beforehand.


There was no other way.



Discussion: To create my poem, I took the title of my favorite book, Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith, and assigned a number value to each of the letters that constitute the title. I started with A equaling one and moved down the line in order. The title then became 15 14 12 25 etc. If a letter repeated, I doubled the initial value (ex: the second O became 30). The goal was that no two numbers were the same. If two numbers were the same, I took the second number and added the initial value until the result was a new number (ex: if there had been a third O, I would have added another 15 to 30 to get 45). Each number then became a page number in the book. I would turn to that page, close my eyes, and put my finger on a spot. I could either use that sentence, the sentence above it, or the sentence below it. If all three options had something specifically to do with the characters or places within the novel, I allowed one more sentence in either direction until a sentence could be found without specific references to the novel. I also added three “wild pages” (one to the beginning, one between the two title words, and one at the end). For the wild pages, I would simply open the book to wherever and perform the same procedure as with the number value pages. In this manner I collected all of the lines that created my poem. I only changed two words within the poem to make the lines more universal. I also played with the spacing and arrangement on the page (although all of the lines are in the order I picked them from the book) to try to achieve different meanings within the lines themselves.

This poem challenges the mainstream conception of poetry in a number of ways. Traditionally, a poem is entirely the work of the poet’s and the poem conforms to some structure to convey the message behind the work. First off, the poem has no rhyme or meter. There also is no structure within the poem. Instead, the poem relies on form, shape, space, and content to evoke emotion in the reader. Each reader will approach the reading differently due to the breaks present between lines and the words affected. The work also challenges the mainstream in that it is not entirely my original work. I borrowed all of the lines from a piece of literature and decided how to arrange them on the page to best suit the emotions I feel while reading the lines together.

Personally, I feel that my poem falls short of stickin’ it to the man. In my personal view, there is not much that can be proved with a poem that is not entirely the poet’s. Because of this, I would feel uncomfortable declaring the poem as entirely mine, and consequently I have a hard time believing that I am breaking down any barriers.

I also disagree with the concept that the more abstract a work is, the more feeling/emotion/meaning can be pulled from the work. Call me old fashioned, but I believe in a poem being as artistic as the poet can be, but without being pseudo philosophical and so abstract even the poet forgets the original meaning. Since I had no original intent behind my poem, I feel like the poem is a little emptier than a poem that I would have labored over from scratch. The reader can find their own meaning behind their readings, but, without my original intent, I feel like the poem is just naked.

Overall, I feel like the poem is not a bad poem. If I were reading it, I would find it more accessible than most experimental poetry and that would make me more inclined to read into the poem and try to interpret it. I think that my poem might succeed in being a transition from more traditional poetry to experimental poetry, but I also feel like it could stand alone and be its own thing.

Fin.