“Anomalistics Aggregate”

Kate Falvey created “Anomalistics Aggregate” from The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort (1919). Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, Kate Falvey writes:

I associate Charles Fort with my early Skeptical Girl enthusiasms for esoterica and arcane amalgamations. I remember being struck many moons ago by Fort’s absolute delight in the language and lore of weird (possibly) occult lushness. His work is a bounty for word pickers and phenomenon seekers, and I can remember being enamored of a life spent collating the bizarre and inexplicable: blood rain, rains of fish and frogs, floating cities, spontaneous combustion, UFO’s….

For this poem sequence, I had a few rules that I dispensed with pretty swiftly, words in order of appearance being one of them. I rather roamed around at random and tried to make a semi-coherent impressionistic story of sorts—heavy on the haze. Every now and then I found a conjunction or some other kind of transition word—but all words are in The Book of the Damned and many a phrase just needed to be kept intact.

Also by Kate Falvey at Heron Tree: “Three Visionary Girls,” “Dorothy Almost Imagined,” and “Drinking Daisies.”