Set the Alarm for Spring: why random is better

My friend and collaborator Arnold McBay is an artist and musician. He frequently makes intriguing short films exploring very elemental objects such as clouds and branches. These often move slowly, change slowly, emerge to be only more themselves. He is always finding the surprising and mysterious quiddity of things with perfectly simple means.

Last night he sent me a short film (1 minute long) of branches moving as if they were the hands of a clock. This is exactly my kind of thing and I couldn’t resist and so asked if I could write some text and make the audio for it. So I did. I wrote a short poems and made an audio track from the sounds of breaking sticks and a typewriter (since the poem refers to the trees “writing” and the repeated sounds of the sticks breaking sounded like a typewriter.)

I was intrigued by the idea of a tree “writing” in time by growing. How a tree is a kind of writing in time. Of time.

I wrote the poem and it was ok, but line to line, a bit flat. So then I had the idea of mixing up the lines in order to create more energy between lines. I remembered how a student had showed me how she randomized lines using Excel and a sorting procedure. (You create random numbers using the RAND function in a second column and then sort the numbers from high to low, bringing the lines you’ve inserted in the first column with them and thus into random order.)

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that random was more interesting than my original order. Thank you, Mr. Cage. But part of the reason is that it breaks apart the logical chain between lines that is initially created. Sometimes I run a poem backwards for the same reason, though it maintains another kind of order. But the leaps between lines are larger and therefore have more energy. The mind leaps like a squirrel between branches in order to form the poem. Always more exciting to get the reader more involved and/or thinking like a squirrel.

Below is the original poem and then the Excel randomized one. My final poem altered a line in the random order because though squirrel-mind is brilliant it doesn’t always land.

At the very end of post, I’ve added Arnold’s film with my poem and sound. He’s called it “Set the Alarm for Spring.” As they say in IG and TikTok reels, let me know what you think in the comments below.

a tree is writing.
an inscription of time 
a calligraphy of trunk and branches
the hidden hours of roots. 

the thousand interconnected clocks of a forest
moving through the seasons
not prehistory but the always-present

leaves close like eyes
fall to the ground like eyes
open again green
set the alarm for spring
there’s writing to be done