Response to Zac Cooper's Improv, Week 7

Introduction to Exposition

I ask them to take their favorite pen
and place it in front of the paper background
like an object which provides scale

or knock on the cover, and notice
that it never sounds hollow.

I say drop a lab-mouse into a paragraph
and watch him weave in and out of letters,

or mingle through the sentences’ bedrooms
and study the wallpaper for symbolism.

I want them to dislodge from plot,
badgering meaning from white spaces
instead of black ink.

But all they want
is to untie themselves from this chair
and flee to the nearest synopsis.

The draft seems to acutely mimic the voice of Billy Collins in which it often takes the poem it improvs from and slightly shifts it into the context of writing a paper rather than a poem. Future drafts could try to shift away for the more overt use of Collins’ poem in which the voice could, perhaps, highlight a more heavy tone as compared to Collins’ lighter tone in his poem. A way to expand on the draft, then, might be to evoke a more descriptive account of the writers themselves or perhaps create a juggling act between the perspective of the speaker and the perspective of the writer to highlight a deeper connotation to their relationship.