Experimental Poem

The Acrostic Chance method (number 8) of experimental poetry
Chill Factor by Sandra Brown
3 8 9 12 12 6 1 3 20 15 18

Chill Factor

Collar up to his ears, which were
Here simply to escape
In the general direction of the
Load these boxes into your trunk
Load these boxes into your trunk

Fingertips. The latex gloves had
A record
Collar up to his ears, which were
The road. She
Of the relief that
Right shoul-

Doing a poem in the Acrostic method for me was enjoyable because I didn’t really know what was going to come of the poem. The first book I was going to use this method on was The Stars My Destination; it did not work for me because the book started on page seven instead of the necessary page one. However this was quickly remedied when I grabbed Chill Factor by Sandra Brown. While this book was my girlfriends, it did have the added bonus of starting on page one so it would work for this experimental poetry assignment. Going through the title and finding the corresponding lines was almost like putting together a puzzle that you have never seen before. I was anxious at first to see if the poem would actually make sense until it clicked in my brainium cranium that this poem was supposed to be experimental and it did not have to make sense. After that I just skimmed through the book writing down the lines with an understanding to how it was going to work out at the end. After finishing the poem and reading over the finished project I was very happy with how it turned out. The only thing I would have changed is the last two lines because, as weird as this process was the rest of the poem actually worked. My favorite part of the poem was the last two lines of the first stanza, which read: “Load these boxes into your trunk.” I still cheese out when I read those because I think of Steve Carrell’s line from 40 year old virgin, “I hope you have a big trunk because I am putting my bike into it.”
For many mainstream critics that do not like the idea of this kind of experimental poetry I say to them, “Sit down, shut up, and mind your own business.” Who is to say or decide what in the end constitutes poetry? I believe that the final and finished product and what they release to the public in the end is up to the poet. It is the poet’s creation, not the critics that is released to the public. Language is not something you can nail down, and since this is true (in my opinion) poetry is also not something that can be cut and dried. The poem that I wrote for this experimental exercise doesn’t even necessarily have kind of deeper meaning. And while I know this poem doesn’t really mean anything that does not necessarily mean that the reader won’t get some kind of deeper meaning or connection from the poem. The basic idea that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”; I believe can be applied to any poem experimental or otherwise. As long as someone gets something from the poem it is worth the work of either writing the poem or in my case paging through the book and finding lines. I do believe in the end that this poem is successful in challenging the notions of mainstream language or ideology because it leaves the meaning and understanding up to the reader, who in the end is actually (in my opinion) the final judge of the work. And as the poet, and the reader of the poem I must say that I enjoyed writing the poem just as I enjoyed reading it and trying to figure out what it actually meant.