Madeline's Commentary
“Wallflowering at the Mime Party” began as single poem in a sequence of poems; I think the third or fourth. I had just read Alice Notley’s Culture of One, was fascinated by her writing process, and trying it out for myself. To my understanding, Notley didn’t painstakingly revise individual poems in this book, but would make concessions, have the speaker change her mind, and so forth in later poems. For instance, a character might be introduced as a cousin, and in a later poem be reintroduced as a niece. That is, instead of revising the first poem, all changes occur in future poems.
I wrote a series of poems, attempting to use this process of revision, but I am no Alice Notley, and I soon left this process behind.
“At the Mime Party” attempts to do some of the work that the surrounding poems from my original sequence did. And it’s clearly revised. This version pays more attention to line breaks, sound, and form. The content of the poem itself is, perhaps, odd, so my revision here attempts to give the poem structure in its quatrains and controlled line breaks. I chose to abandon the caesuras and other ruptures that made the world of the poem unstable. And I am uncomfortable saying that this version is finished; I’m one of those people who thinks a poem is never quite done, or I have yet to ever write one.