Poetry Remake: Poems Squeezed Out from Five Popular Novels

All of us are familiar with film remakes. Now, what about a poetry remake? Yes, you can squeeze a haiku, say, out of Ginsberg’s longass Howl; or you can also write a sonnet based on a short story. This collection of poems is remade from five popular novels. 

Introduction

Remake. It is most prevalent in the world of films. So, a film has already been made but you retell it in a different way. That is what a remake is, or in the words of  George S. Larke-Walsh (A Companion to the Gangster Film), it is ‘a new version of an existing film’. 

Like a film can be remade, we can create new versions of any literary piece. For that matter, it can also be omniformat. Poems can been made into films — one of my favourite remakes has been Howl by Allen Ginsberg. See the YouTube video at the bottom. Likewise, films can be remade into poems, a short story into a film, a drama into a novel, a film into a short story and so on. This is the meaning of omniformat. 

I have also remade haiku and other poems out of rock n’ roll numbers on this blog:

• Haiku Laobiyu: A Series of Haiku Squeezed Out from Popular Rock & Roll Songs
• Rock n’ Roll, Summarised : A collection of poems remade from Paranoid (Black Sabbath),  Rockin’ All Over the World (Status Quo), White Rabbit (Jefferson Airplane), Masters of War (Bob Dylan), and Killing in the Name of (Rage Against the Machine).

You pretty much get the point now. 

🔖 Contents

So, I have cherrypicked five popular novels and remade them into poems.

1. Post Office
   Charles Bukowski (1971)
2. Trainspotting
   Irvine Welsh (1993)
3. Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
   Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
4. Fear of Flying
   Erica Jong (1973)
5. Imphal Amasoong Magi Ising Noongsitki Fibham
   Loitongbam Pacha Meitei (Manipuri novella: loosely Imphal and its Environs 1972)
   

Ⲷ  Howl animation (YouTube embed)

Please note that I have already posted these poem remakes but individually. Now I have slightly edited the text and got new graphics as well, and am posting all of these in one post here. You can also get a PDF of the collection. Check link below.

 

Post Office

A million of mails and none is mine
I’m not even a messenger, but just a worker though it’s fine
Fucking fine — it’s work and on the way to work I drink
Sometimes all I need is a quiet place to think
But it’s fine, perfectly fine, like when I have to visit my girl
Never mind these drinks always that make my head awhirl.

A good lay, a good drink; what else do you need?
If only from drudgery his bloody god lets my boss and I be freed
Fifty jobs, running, and all I got from life is a reason to booze
And all my partners I have been sleeping with to give their dues
Life is unfair when you’re poor;
What’s the sin in being poor?

I wanted the whole world or nothing; but these hellholes
The whole world is full of billions of assholes
Twelve years of this shit is done, I repeat it’s done
Tomorrow I’m going to start writing and get out of this donjon.

Trainspotting

You hurt yourself when you fix the stuff but you carry it on
You hurt others when you fix the stuff but you carry it on
The reasons? There are no reasons.
Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?
Take the best orgasm. Multiply it by twenty.
It’s still fucking miles off the pace.
And it’s all in the hand of Mother Superior.
’Tho she knows not the thousand junk dilemmas
And the kick lasts less than the minutes it takes to shit.

When I hit rock bottom, all I need is the last hit
I can go for rehab
I can go with methadone
I can lock myself up in a hotel room
I can tolerate the wankers
But all I need is one single shot.

Morphine, diamorphine, buprenorphine
Nalbuphine, pethidine, pentazocine
Cyclozine, codeine, temazepam
Nitrazepam, phenobarbitone, sodium amytal
Dextropropoxyphene, methadone
Dextromoramide, chlormethiazole
Spasmoproxybon, Lobain, Nitrosun-10
All that does . . . — anything will do now
Fuck they say relapse’s a part of recovery
Sobriety shows me dead bodies on the walls and ceilings
And nightmares during lunch hour; insomnia in the afternoon
Muscle cramp and pain and constipation all the time.
There must be less to life than this!

The gadgies are not well
The gadgies I cannot depend on them.
Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud, Second Prize
The mates are a waste of fucking time
We are going to see some Pogues and Iggy Pops
No crime is good but nothing is too much
They may be mad at me; they may fucking curse me
Oh! the fellow feeling amongst bloody users
I don’t know about them
I’m going beyond the mountains.
There must be more to life than this!

Slaughterhouse-Five

So it goes
The bombs and battles
One and a half million people die
There is nothing special in telling about killing
It only makes truer how fact and fiction blend seamlessly

And then life began
Everything is beautiful and nothing hurts

A war took me out of my comfort zone
I was in Schlachthof-fünf, a slaughterhouse
In the enemy’s land, as a prisoner; and my people
They were bombing our enemy
I might have died with the enemies
All bad things, though, did come to an end

How nice — to feel nothing,
And still get full credit for being alive!

I take the folks’ saying, to make love not war, to heart
And a family, a wife, a dozen of kids, an insurance policy and a TV
It is just the way of living for billions of humans
All this happens, more or less
And it is far better than our stupidity to wage wars

And no one knows
Who might get lucky in life, living life more than others

But I’m un-un-unstuck in time
When the aliens take me to their home in Tralfamadore
I might die and I might live and I’m no hero
Their four-dimension existence only confuses
Even more, when they say free will is an illusion

Who cares about bombing in unknown cities far away?
Optometry sounds more real than reality.

Fear of Flying

Zippers can fell like flower petals
Like in Laphu Makhong, like men fall for everything
Any kind of falling is scary
It’s scary to think about flying when I have pteromerhanophobia
It’s scary to get off the ground
But the trouble has been dictated already
If I don’t risk anything, I risk even more.

And the ads and whorescopes appear
You just take care of your smells, your hair,
your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits,
your crotch, your stars, your scars,
your choice of Scotch in bars
And the knight in bloody armour will arrive
And fly away together to the moon

But what I wish is not what it is
It is not what I want and what I want not
In the name of fidelity, I sleep with my partner
Fuck the one you don’t want to fuck
And pretend he’s the one you do
And ignore the one you want to do.
That’s fidelity. That’s monogamy.
That’s called decorum and its discontents
Oh! let the men bear my babies
But they are only interested in women in spurts

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure
And the society leers,
For it is entirely made up of people who like no sex.

Imphal Amasoong Magi Ising Noongsitki Fibham

I

What I believe is what I see
But what I saw was not what I had believed
At the adopted home faraway from my fatherland
Once I had the idea of its innocence naïvely

That special land my forefathers belong to
That charm of the unseen land I had imagined from anecdotes
That special feeling of seeing the most beautiful girls
Who can in the entire world be prettier than Moirang Thoibi?

Thence it was a time for revolution
It was a time of degeneration
The folks were raising their guns
The folks were changing their gods

II
How heavenly it would be to live under the skies in Imphal
I would not have ask for more; alas, it was different; yes, it was
Just like the ubiquitous temples back in my adopted home
——Debauchery and revelry, can the visually impaired see plainly

If those were not enough
I saw in the different classes of people
Layers of dust and grime equally over the masters and slaves shrouded
Amongst them, Imphal was losing its holiness by choice

One fine day I had went to the Loktak
But its majesty was no match for the love
One man was making to his woman in the bush
The Imphal Grand Fuck had broken through bedrooms.

III
The mothers are going with their daughters to trade flesh
Outsiders are sucking out the fleshless bones of the natives
People are giving birth to bastards and forsaking the newborns on the streets
More people are on the streets, protesting, squeaking, against anything

The leaders, in cahoots with businessmen, are lost in orgy and merrymaking
And people are losing their voices, albeit giving in to sporadic animal yelling
And people are drowned in their hypocrisies
And more people are dying like me, unsung and unknown.

Imphal is melting with its vapours of verisimilitude:
And any tragedy is more atrocious when it befalls us,
And the cracks in the holy land have branched out across the environs
Such was the place I had believed, and I saw it.

Watch

Howl is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955. The poem is considered to be one of the great works of the Beat Generation. This poem was originally written as a performance piece, but it was later published by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books. Howl was originally considered to be obscene, and Ferlinghetti was arrested and charged with its publication.

The animation by Eric Drooker is taken from the 2010 film Howl:

Credit: The graphics in the collection have been designed using resources from Flaticon.com and a concept influenced by Mondrian patterns.

Note: Poetry Remake is also available as a PDF (475ᴷᴮ). You can download it to add it in your reading collection. It is saved on my Google Drive, so it is perfectly safe to use/save it.