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Redacted Poem: War and Thoughts

Posted on January 31, 2021January 31, 2021 by Nathalie Lawrence

A friend and I were talking about how most of the people we went to high school and college with (including ourselves) turned out to be pretty mediocre. This sparked a search for one of my classmates to see if he ever made it in LA. A few years after college, I remember him being a PA on a couple of big TV shows. His Facebook profile is pretty barren now, and his name is too common for Google to be helpful.

However, he did attend his friend’s book signing a few years ago. Curious-jealous bitch that I am, I abandoned my search for my classmate’s whereabouts and stalked his author-friend instead. I couldn’t get into the novel’s sample pages, but the author does have some found poetry up on their website that’s pretty damn good.

I forgot found/redacted poetry was a thing! I’m an awful poet (maybe I’ll share my nonsense from high school and college with you someday so we can both laugh), but I love mixed media. I was also a government bureaucrat for over eight years, so redaction gives the machine cog in me a little thrill. One of the worst parts of that job was trying to sway people with power over policy into doing better but being utterly ineffectual. With redaction, I can say something, even if it’s nonsense.

My first effort is with a page from the table of contents of a Romanian literary studies journal. Completely random, but they have excellent taste in titles, perfect for redaction. I will probably use them as source material again in the future. Hope you can laugh at it as much as I did.

The finished words:

War and thoughts
Evil and self
Stupid and moral politics

Simultaneous
revery and musicality
in a parable of decades
of reality

Meaning’s negotiation
for vocabulary

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