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Cut-ups
In composing work in response to living eleven years in Louisiana, I have sought out a
range of procedural practices to bring place to the page while stepping back from the
complex freight of affection and frustration I felt, and still feel, about the beautiful, broken
landscape and the cultures situated at the edge of the Gulf. These poems are the result
of one of those procedures. Part of a nine poem series, these poems are composed
from passages excerpted from Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a book often described
as the quintessential New Orleans novel. The composition of the poems was structured
by three constraints: the language was taken from passages where the particulars of
place were foregrounded in the novel; the cuts move forward only in the text; each cut
is marked by a line-break. The photo of the Cherokee rose was taken in Baton Rouge
using an LG Android smart phone; the photos of Barataria Bay were taken using a
Canon Powershot S3 IS digital camera; the New Orleans Mardi Gras photo was taken,
using a Nikon FM1 camera with a 50mm lens.

Marthe Reed is the author of four books: Pleth, a collaboration with j hastain (Unlikely
Books 2013), (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books 2013), Gaze (Black Radish Books
2010) and Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink 2007). A fifth book of
poems, published by Lavender Ink. is forthcoming September 2014. She has also
published six chapbooks, four with Dusie Kollektiv, and two other by above / ground
press and Shirt Pocket Press. An essay on Claudia Rankines The Provenance of
Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue appears in American Letters and Commentary. She
publishes Black Radish Books with Nicole Mauro.