Sometimes you can amaze yourself when composing a poem. Dean McKenzie and I were at a literary event one Sunday long ago at the Convention Centre and we were set up to write poems on demand. But traffic was very slow and, bored, we started writing our own.
Something W. O. Mitchell once said came back to me: that juxtaposition often produced good results when used as a starter. The example he gave was a little old granny behind the wheel of a Big Mac truck. That day, having recently returned from my first New England fall literary excursion, I imagined Emily Dickinson juxtaposed into the world, then, of the WWF, encountering Andre the Giant in the ring. The rest followed and I had this one mostly finished in about 20 minutes, sitting there at the convention. Mitchell was proven right; his gimmick can work in poetry, too.
For the record, Emily did have a second-storey bedroom and she did lower picnic baskets for/to neighborhood children. She did wear a small white dress (she was tiny) which still hangs in the bedroom today for tourists to see. She also did use capital letters on certain words, strategically for emphasis in her poems (not just on opening words of sentences). Andre the Giant, for his part, was one of the most famous wrestlers of the day.
(above: the only photo–a daguerreotype–of Emily at the time she was a student at Holyoke Seminary.)