Mother, Hands, Knife, Man, Story.

Here's a word cloud I created using the poems from my manuscript-in-progress, The Arranged Marriage.  Not much of a surprise to see which words appear most often:  mother, hands, knife, man, story.  And then there's body and room.  Blue surprised me, as did small and pink.

There's a disturbing intelligence to these programs that produce clouds of words.  Here's my manuscript in the shape of a hand, a manuscript that's about hands, about the violence of hands.  I look at the words printed on the thumb:  night body inside small face waiting.

Doesn't that make a discomfiting kind of sense?  Isn't that how poems often work?--the way we tell our students that a poem with effective line breaks can be read down the right-hand margin of its page. Looking only at the last word in each line, we can find a gloss of the whole poem's narrative.  For instance, here's a gloss of one of my favorite poems by Robert Hayden:

early
cold,
ached
made
him.

breaking.
call,
dress,
house,

him,
cold
well.
offices?

Yes, it's the shorthand version of "Those Winter Sundays."  And here's one by Wallace Stevens:

cigars,
whip
curds.
dress
boys
newspapers.
seem.
ice-cream.

deal,
sheet
once
face.
come
dumb.
beam.
ice-cream.

I don't even need to name the poem.  It's so clearly the cold and death of "The Emperor of Ice-Cream." And one more just for fun.  Guess who:

feathers -
soul -
words -
all -

heard -
storm -
Bird -
warm -

land -
Sea -
Extremity -
me.