In Fiction Writing class on July 12, 2013 we took a tour of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, an absolutely lovely building. Then we browsed the shelves of poetry for interesting poems to photocopy. With child-safe scissors, glue sticks, and old postcards purchased at Bookmans we cut words and phrases out of our selected poems and tried to create our own new poems. For my poem I made use of Julie O’Callaghan’s “The Sounds of Earth”, Raymond Queneau’s “The Human Species”, and a word or two from John Donne’s “Air and Angels”.

Human civilised the most popular sound:

talking - mouth air,

a shapeless overfraught flame.

But takes limbs of flesh,

intellect and will,

and with voice,

fix rocking chair, phone, printer, horn,

keyboard, hammer, television, lawn mower.