Steve Roberts on “New Mexico at Night”
This poem was created using a technique I learned from reading Jackson Mac Low. I don't believe he created it, as it's incredibly simple and he reimagined and perfected many older poetic styles and parlor games. For this one, you take the alphabet and assign a word, like "chainsaw" or "lucky" to each letter. Then you pick a word or phrase (I don't remember which I used) and you order the words in that arrangement, and then write a poetic throughline to make it kind of make sense. I enjoy these techniques because it gets ridiculous pretty quickly. Also I appreciate any poetic device that makes it easier to write; you're not trying to get to the end of the line like with a sestina, you're just bouncing from word to word and trying to create the bonding agent between them. To me this is easier, but people have told me it sounds way more complicated than simply writing a poem.
I’m also thinking about John Carpenter's Vampires (1998), which had so much promise. It was about a group of vampire hunters that were like a gang of mercenaries. They must have killed hundreds of bloodsuckers, but this one time they get involved in the life of a recently created innocent-ish vampire, played by Sheryl Lee of Twin Peaks fame. So just this one time, they go in unprepared, breaking a lot of unbreakable rules, and what do you know? It's a lot harder that way.
I'm trying to avoid saying the main character of JC's Vampires is James Woods, but I can't avoid it any longer. This was filmed in the studio that my college's film department worked out of in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There's some fun local landmarks in the film.
I call this poem “New Mexico at Night” but most of the scenes in this movie take place in daytime—easier to kill vampires that way. But I'm thinking more of driving on a New Mexican highway at night, surrounded by an unbelievable amount of endless darkness. It's like driving through the void of space.