Shopping For White
Original:
Blue towards blonde with brown in between. Quota collides cross culture crowds compacting contemplation of clans. Movie reel hums its approval with zebra tie-dyed feature films, contrasted colors counted on fingers. Complement whites read ‘out of stock’ scroll down towards brown and red and black available for shipment. Revision One: Blue towards blonde with brown in between. Quotas creating the crowds of mismatched cultures. Raciatic ratios counted out on fingers as the movie reel hums with the pillagers' approval, showing black, white, asian, again. Click of the mouse leads to segregation if all you want is 'black & white', there's been a recall. Revision Two: Blue towards blonde with brown down the middle. Quotas check-marking colors off the chart. Zoom in to black at the dinner table, showing whites of their teeth to the red of their gums. Click to next scene of white at the dinner table, smiles copy n' paste. Cut back to show laughing with requisite shadow friend surrounded by pale. Revision Three: Blonde and blue sub black and white. Torturous claims on narrowing trains of treacherous individuals tasting their due. Teasing the tailcoat of a table-top learner, many jazz hands fly steady. Lapping in luxury is not the style for an a-tip-ical tar baby. Revision Four: Blonde mix white rub black and blue. Trash talkers elbowing 'til pass-out ensue, change back, dye skin, leave the bleach out to mold. Insensitive tamper traders bleed free with the grease of their past. Battered and fried. Tossed in a sauce of disregard. Revision Five: Totem mayhem tallied on desert fingers with tribal tattoos unseen in the live wire millions that bash through the dust. Pictures of natives float top down on Atlantic with brown fleeing brown. Sun don't stain where grass had'n lain. Piss drips heavy on the head when you're sealed in a wooden crate. |
Process Memo:
I've been reading a lot of Haryette Mullen and am so impressed by her word play and diction that I've been playing around with it in a lot of my poems where they're shorter, but really dense. The original poem came from my Women in Literature class from an exercise that we had to do to make one of the poets' pieces our own by creating something with a similar vein running through. We had been discussing how Mullen wrote the poems for her work called S*PeRM**K*T, in the early 90's and in that work, she wrote a poem about being a child and seeing the baby food with only white babies with blue eyes and for some reason she remembered it and it dawned on me that maybe if she was writing that piece today, the circumstance would be completely different because in advertising, and just general society, there has been this movement of political correctness, and racial segregation awareness where everyone almost goes too far with including people of different races, such as commercials that have different scenes with a families in the kitchen and you can count off how many are of difference races and there seems to be a sort of ratio to it, so I decided to write what I thought Mullen would be aware of and decided to add this poem to the website because it does encompass a lot of the form and style I have been using for the past month, which helps understand a lot of the other poems on this website as well. For my original draft, I started with a line using the colors, knowing that's the main point I want the reader to focus on. I like using the prose form, but using poetic syntax that seems to throw away the small conjoining words. Every revision seemed like a completely different story to me. They all called for the same form, but many of them didn't call for the same content so I had this horrible urge to make every one different and I think it tells more of a story, but these ones were hard to miniscule-y change because of how packed in each word was and each word seemed big and needed in that place, so it wasn't as if that verb didn't fit because it didn't show the image fully, but instead that verb may not have fit into the sound of the sentence, or the tone I was trying to master in that one draft. Revision one, I try and keep as close as possible to the original poem, however, since it is from another class I felt that maybe if I change up the poem completely then it's as if it is a whole new poem, standing on it's own, but still better with the surrounding poems to buffer it. |