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White

Mark Wyatt

I forget almost everything, a page blank

lost in blizzards that could be anywhere

towards the North or South Pole but what

are they? If I could only dream an igloo

or meet arctic bears on their way to the

wedding then maybe I'd know who I am for

example. Have my sins been absolved? Not

another journey through soap-powder, new

loss. This might be dacryolin I'm seeing

through frost-bite, but is the swan-song

I'm hearing really my teeth, splintering

icebergs, gliding together? Handkerchief

tipp-ex allow me to write! If snowstorms

clear, our virginal footprints might run

to a place where crystalline air hammers

frozen peak. I flag surrender, crumpling

foolscap. The answer is not the desolate

cold to the wasting quests of separation

which hurt as you open a washing machine

I am an exile until glaciers cover earth

Mark Wyatt’s pattern poems employ a monospaced font. The reader interested in writing shape or pattern poems in this way could use a monospaced font in Microsoft Word, such as Aptos Mono, Cascadia Mono, or Courier New. Once the poem is conceptualized, the technique involves first developing the poem’s shape with the help of graph paper or ‘x’s on a computer screen. This step is crucial for determining how many characters (letters + spaces + punctuation marks) are required for each line, though poems with strict geometrical shapes, such as squares, will of course be even (e.g., 40 characters per line x 20 lines). While drafting the poem, the poet using this technique will constantly be counting letters, which thus function as number-like particles, contributing syntactically, semantically, and visually to the poem’s design.

Mark Wyatt’s pattern poetry is in the tradition of the 4th Century Latin poet, Optatian, and the 20th Century American poet, John Hollander. Some of his earlier such work, in maps and geometrical shapes, appeared in Ambit, Echo Room, P.E.N. New Poetry II (Arts Council/Quartet), Nine Muses Poetry, Poetry Nottingham, and Slow Dancer. Recent work, produced after a long gap while he was teaching in South and South-East Asia and the Middle East (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8647-8280), has appeared in Greyhound Journal, Ink Sweat and Tears, and Sontag Mag, and is forthcoming from Full Bleed, and Osmosis.

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