Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone by Nancy Chen Long

Poetry
40 pages
8.5" x 5.5" single signature with hand sewn binding
Published November 2013

In the poem “Mythica”, Nancy Chen Long tells us narratives grow over time into myth, and yet, she has constructed a chapbook in reverse. Her poems start with the story of Icarus, and move away from him to people and places that feel at home in our time. And while Icarus’ decent in slow circles mirrors the chaotic and war-torn experience of the people who populate these poems (giving the collection an excellent cyclonic structure), one is left to wonder if hubris is something humanity can ever hope to escape.

Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone is the result of Nancy’s participation in the 2013 Pulitzer Remix Project, which took place during April and was sponsored by Found Poetry Review. For the project, poets wrote one poem a day from a Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction. Each poet had a different source text and Nancy was assigned the 1949 Pulitzer winner Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens. Poets were challenged to create new poems that varied in topic and theme from the original text, rather than merely regurgitating the novels in poetic form. Found poems are the literary equivalents of collages, where words, phrases and lines from existing texts are refashioned into new poems. The genre includes centos, erasure poetry, cut-up poetry, collage, remix, and other textual combinations. The chapbook is Nancy’s first major foray into found poetry. The technique she primarily used was remix, in which she mixed and rearranged phrases and individual words chosen out of a selection of text, as well as new words that were not in the selection, but that were discovered by applying erasure to a word or phrase. For more information about found poetry and a few of the techniques that can be used, see “About Found Poetry” at the Found Poetry Review, “Absent Things As If They Are Present” by Jeannie Vanasco, and “Collaboration and remix [by Rachel Barenblat]” at American Poetry. For more information about remix as it applies to the creative process, listen to Austin Kleon’s talk “Steal Like An Artist” and Kirby Ferguson’s talk “Everything is a remix”.

“Ingenious, original Nancy Chen Long creates a tantalizing poem collage in Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone. When Chen Long mixes her 21st-century perceptions and depth of compassion with the vocabulary from a Pulitzer Prize-winning twentieth-century war novel, Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens, an imaginary longitude line appears. Across this line connections and sympathies meet, while disconnections and antipathies spar. From her remix the poet makes a seriously playful, playfully serious collage. The irresistible result marks the debut of an inventive new American poet.”

—Molly Peacock