I really enjoyed the process of Disarticulations. Over the years I have used both the collage method and cut up technique for writing poems many times. This exercise reminded me of that. Some of the phrases from Terry’s fevered writing were so poignant that I used them close to verbatim in different parts of my poem. I looked for aligning themes and also tried to de-familiarize the meaning by putting different clauses together in a different order. Some of the lines had words that were rearranged from Terry’s word bank. Originally I composed a longer poem and then decided to cut some of it. I began by trying to use all of the words and came up with a poem that was close to 50 lines long. I then decided to trim about 7 or 8 lines to make it crisper. In many ways this exercise is comparable to putting together a puzzle. I enjoyed the challenge and would gladly do it again. — Mike Sonksen
dis•articulations 2015 