Negative Image Procedure

(after Timothy Donnelly & Oni Buchanan & Carey McHugh)

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit… the arbitrariness of the constraint only serves to obtain precision of execution.

Igor Stravinsky

1. Choose one of the attached poems or find another Phillip B. Williams poem.
2. Create a Negative Imageof that poem, which is to say, write a new poem that negates or otherwise alters the original—word by word, line by line, idea by idea. (This idea is based on experiments devised by the Oulipo: School of French Experimental Writers.)

How can you “negate” or otherwise alter a poem?

Quite literally, you may take the oppositeof each word you come across, keeping in mind that some words, which seem to have no opposite, have dozens of opposites. For example, the opposite of potato is clearly …pineapple, or kudzu, or homicide…

3. When you have finished negating the poem, go back and revise, rearrange, change words, whatever you need to do to polish it and connect lines and ideas. Your final poem should maintain (more or less) the structure of the original.
4. Pay close attention to sonic elements of words that may plant a seed for words that follow in subsequent lines and stanzas. Allow slant rhymes, consonance, assonance, alliteration, internal rhymes, etc. to guide you as you bring the poem together.
5. Create a title that helps direct the reader.

Cascade

For all the fatherless children, the lake’s bottom.

For all the children butchered by abandonment

make them somnambulists in heatless nights.

Give a sleepwalking boy a lyre of smoke and a score

he can’t read. Rest, I tell my legs as they march

to the tune of a night terror toward the black

wet’s call. I’ll go in as flesh and come out

as water falling from the bowl of a pelican’s beak.

Hunter 

When you were mine though not
mine at all permanently, just a body borrowed
without permission, a body interrupted,
interruptive—

the sky opened like a secret in a mouth

mouth with a word in it

word with an arrowhead in its flank: Love, small

creature it was

crying in the night beneath me

Final Poem for My Father Misnamed in My Mouth

Sunlight still holds you and gives
your shapelessness to every room.
By noon, the kitchen catches your hands,
misshapen sun rays. The windows
have your eyes. Taken from me,
your body. I reorder my life with
absence. You are everywhere now
where once I could not find you
even in your own body. Death means
everything has become
possible. I’ve been told I have
your ways, your laughter haunts my mother
from my mouth. Everything
is possible. Fatherlight
washes over the kitchen floor.
I try to hold a bit of kindness
for the dead and make of memory
a sponge to wash your corpse.
Your name is not addict or sir.
This is not a dream: you died
and were buried three times. Once,
after my birth. Again, against
your hellos shedding into closing doors,
your face a mask I placed over my face.
The final time, you beneath my feet. Was I
buried with you then? I will not call
what you had left anything
other than gone and sweet perhaps. I am
not your junior, but I
survived. I fell in love with being
your son. Now what? Possibility
was a bird I once knew. It had one wing.