Siobhan Dale Co-Editor-in-Chief
Since Ezra Pound’s modernist injunction to “Make it New” in the early 20th century, poets have been experimenting with new forms, stylistic innovations, and bolder content. The modernist imperative seems to suggest that contemporary writers should always look forward at what is new, or predict what is coming and write with that in mind. But what if we as writers also choose to look back? Would it be possible to rewrite traditional forms and reclaim them as our own? To answer this question, I’ve decided to rewrite one of the simplest and most familiar poems in English, one that most people learn in primary school: “Roses are red/violets are blue.”
GERTRUDE
Roser through red
Violented are blue
If you make mine
Your parts split two
Fold
LAVINIA
Erosion with red
Vibrate by blue
A single tight hand
A cork and a screw
Hold
LADY MACBETH
Rewinded red
Oblided blue
I took out blood spot
Replace with –
Whisper – you.
OPHELIA
Deranging red
Ranged the flowers blue
Forty tiny looms, and I –
Paused to rage all you.
JULIET
Master red
Bated blue
Divided words until
Julie, Julie, divides
As bodied two.
THREE WITCHES
Triple rise red
Bodified blue
Chant, a triple body
Three times, we chant
Undo
TITANIA
Perversely red
Bestill blue
Fornifoured, I mean
Down two by two,
I fornicate, hoof-man
Pulse me through.
REGAN
Remove – out – red
Round boundage blue
BDSM says, sadistcism
Practices with sisters two.
Tear.
GONERIL
Remove out red
Bondage round blue
BDSM says, incestism
Insists sisters two –
Share.
ANTIOCHUS’ DAUGHTER
Unnamed a thing red
Cradled a thing blue
Perverse fractures a gentle
Thing daddy names as you
Daddy whispers I choose you,
I’ve coupled this familiar poetic form with some familiar characters by having a series of Shakespeare’s female characters as my narrators. This pairing of character and form allows us to see how literary tradition is forged not just by looking forward, but by looking back and transforming old forms into our own new forms. Indeed, as Michael North explains in an article in Guernica, Pound himself found “Make it New” in an old text, or rather, two old texts: “the Da Xue (Ta Hio), first of the four books of Confucian moral philosophy, and the T’ung-Chien Kang-Mu, a classic digest and revision of an even older Chinese history.” Pound appropriated the phrase, and it became the watchword of the modernist movement. But as North shows, “making it new” also means “reworking the old.”