“Forslin’s Jig”

Jonathan Yungkans created “Forslin’s Jig” from The Jig of Forslin by Conrad Aiken (1916). Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, Jonathan writes:

Writing “Forslin’s Jig” followed a reasonably simple process. Begin at the final line of Conrad Aiken’s poem. Read line by line in reverse order. Let intuition do much of the rest for overall logic and flow. I had written another version of “Jig” several years ago, following the same method. This was purely out of love for Aiken’s music and imagery, without my remembering there was such a thing as a cento or “found” poetry. That version has been lost. This one feels more compact, but the narrative curve remains the same overall.