Liner Notes

Yesterday was Don’s 49th birthday, a matter, if you’ve been following, of great emotional charge. (I’m hoping he has 49 more.)

I was a bit disappointed in myself. I’d made the family’s favorite chocolate pie (doubling the amount of chocolate the recipe calls for), but when we tried to buy him this red leather chair, he decided to wait until it was on sale. I also tried to buy him books, but nothing leapt off the shelves for him. So I had nothing, nada, zip, except for pie and love.

“Write something,” he said. He knows I’m miserable when I slack off. “Write me something and post it on your blog.”

Well, okay. I set the timer, a trick I use when I can’t seem to focus, and wrote something about how he’d endured the inconvenience and irritation of wearing a Holter monitor over the weekend –11 sticky, itchy electrodes and a quarter mile of wire and a sinister black box (well, actually beige)
recording his heart sounds for 48 hours.

That’s jolly. Not.

While I wrote that, I had the Gin Blossoms going on iTunes and looked over at two stacks of CD jewel cases. I wrote:

I still like albums–vinyl ones, with 14-inch-square cardboard covers. There’s more canvas for the cover artists and the type is legible. Jewel cases are just–okay. They fracture too easily and someone thinks they need to be packaged hermetically enough to protect (us? or the CDs?) from anthrax.

On the other hand, the name jewel case suggests something valuable must be in there. And you can stack them so you can read the artist names and titles without tilting your head, which is warp-city with vinyl…

And that’s when I decided to brainstorm a
found-poem using the artist names and CD titles I could read from where I sat. A poem that employed at least a dozen of these, used this found language in nearly every line, and was at least 16 lines long. And I couldn’t change the grammatical contruction or break up any of the found bits (enjambments were permitted). Oh, and it needed to say something. That made sense, at least to the recipient.

So, here are the Official Final Draft Stats for "Jewel Case Chanson":

• Number of possible sources: 30.
• Number of found items used: 17.
• Final number of lines: 20.
• Number of lines with at least 1 found word: 19.
• Initial time for exercise: about 30 minutes.
• Total time for exercise, including tweaking: about 3 hours.

Extra credit: Can you identify all 17 references in Jewel
Case Chanson? Remember, either the artist name OR the CD title was used.