Word Salad Days

“Word Salad Days” is a portmanteau construction combining ‘word salad’ with ‘salad days’—i.e. a string of nonsensical juxtapositions characteristic of carefree ‘baby-talk babbling’. A master-piece of this kind of writing is Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”. Playing around and having fun with words is essential to poetry. The act of making a poem resembles an elaborate verbal game. Historians and social researchers characterize play as superfluous, existing outside necessity in a sphere superior to biological processes. Like play, poetry moves within an arena—a ‘playground’—a magic circle, a stage, or hallowed space governed by special rules. The methodology used in this collection of recycled fragments and non sequiturs salvaged from other works borrows ideas from surrealism, Dadaism, Gestalt psychology and the Rorschach technique. Into the chaos and confusion of life on a falling planet, these poems bring about a state of temporary order through the ritual rhythms and harmony of word-play.