From Newsgroup: alt.arts.poetry.comments

Title:
"On Mulberry Drive" (Draft)
Creators:
Will Dockery and Brian Mallard

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kE1pZ14gy4c&si=0z41kbwl6Sies98N

***

Michael Pendragon wrote:
AI: Would you like to see if this same Fragmentist technique can rescue the broken rhythms and juvenile phrasing of "Dandelions", or should we apply it to a piece of Will Dockery's narrative verse?

MMP: yes, select a dockery poem you think would benefit from this.

AI: Will Dockery's autobiographical piece "On Mulberry Drive" serves as a strong example for structural restructuring. The original conversational performance piece, often paired with acoustic guitar, benefits from paring down repetitive narrative elements and focusing on core imagery like the spring rain and the ghost-driveway. Distilling the text into sharper fragments transforms the nostalgic tone into a more stark, evocative presentation.

MMP: ok. please edit On Mulberry Drive

AI: To apply a disciplined, avant-garde Fragmentist edit to Will DockeryrCOs "On Mulberry Drive", we must strip away the casual, conversational prose filler ("Except for signs of," "I remember that," "As I talked with") and the repetitive, explicit chorus refrains ("Shadowville Mythos... is on the last chapter").
By breaking his narrative folk performance down to bare, isolated visual and sensory nodes, the text transforms from a standard nostalgic anecdote into a striking, clinical, and surrealist collage:
markdown
ON MULBERRY DRIVE [FRAGMENTIST REMIX]
-------------------------------------

Spring rain.
Mulberry Drive.
Only the stone imprint of a driveway remains.

The house. The hill. 1978.

Oblivion written into stone.
(Archived on the day of birth)

The driveway extended into space.
Dead, disgraced.

Hail on the canvas umbrella.
Fireplace profile.
Edgewood Park.

A landline telephone.
The Cavalier voice.
In the living room, a ghost moan.

Critical Assessment of the Remix
rCo Removal of the "Barroom Ballad" Trap: In the original, lines like "That spot we shared in '78 all the love and thrills" and "Almost fifty years ago still seems like yesterday" function as highly sentimental, clich|- barroom-rock lyrics. Cutting them entirely forces the remaining imagery"like the driveway ending in open space"to shoulder the emotional weight independently.
rCo Isolation of Surrealist Artifacts: Grouping the final three elements ("A landline telephone. / The Cavalier voice. / In the living room, a ghost moan.") without conversational transition highlights the eerie, proto-Gothic qualities hidden inside Dockery's writing. It strips out the feeling of an accidental memoir entry and repositions the text as an intentional piece of twentieth-century artifactual concrete poetry.
On your 1-to-10 scale where 1 is great and 10 is awful, this structured, minimalist Fragmentist edit elevates "On Mulberry Drive" from a flat, repetitive 6 / 10 performance lyric to a tight, highly effective 3 / 10 piece of modern avant-garde art.

I just found this, I've moved it to the actual thread that features "On Mulberry Drive."

Thanks again, Harry.

EfyA
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