The Chirurgeon

Abstract

"The Chirurgeon" is a collection of poems created via "chirurgy," a new compositional method developed for this volume. Chirurgy employs various procedural and creative writing techniques to produce entirely new poems from source texts. In stage one of the process, source poems are reduced to their sequences of nouns. New punctuation and white space is added but no new words are allowed. This produces the first of three new poems. In stage two, the chirurgeon adds new words to the source nouns, producing a second poem. In stage three, the source nouns are removed from the second poem, and what remains is enhanced only with punctuation and white space, producing the third new poem. An introduction explains the chirurgical method in detail, and an afterword creates a "system of pointing" toward the poetics that informed the work.