Rewriting anne rice’s ‘the witching hour’ as poetry

I first read Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour when I was 15. I had a mass market paperback copy that totaled around 1,000 pages. It was the longest book I had ever read.

It took me six weeks to finish it. I got through the final pages on a Friday night. I remember because I stayed up until about midnight to do so, and all weekend afterwards I had a twitch in my right eye from the strain of reading such small print for so long.

I recently picked up a first edition hardcover of The Witching Hour, published by Knopf in 1990. This copy smells like mildew; I imagine it sat in a musty basement for many years before landing with me. The copy has obviously been read, for the spine rests at a slant now.

It’s been over 25 years since I read through this text. As I’ve been flipping through its pages again, I keep wondering what would happen if I play with the words on each page.

I started a similar experiment in 2013 with Andy Warhol’s a, A Novel, in which I created one poem from each page. My constraint was to use only the text available on whatever page I was working from that day. That project became No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol, published by Book*hug in 2015.

I have decided to attempt a similar experiment with Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour. Obviously, this is a vastly different text than Warhol’s a, A Novel.

Warhol’s novel was not even actually a novel, which would imply a work of fiction: Instead, it is a collection of raw transcripts of recordings that capture various conversations and happenings among Warhol’s Factory contingent.

Warhol’s work is reflective of a specific period in time and documents real life conversations and confessions. It is also a difficult read, as the transcripts were never edited for grammar, spelling, or coherence. It feels raw and experimental, and is a challenging read to sift through as there is no plot, narrative, or context.

Rice’s work is truly a polished novel. Though sprawling in its length - the first edition hardcover tops out at a whopping 965 pages - it is a fully realized work of fiction, a family saga of witchcraft. It is also the first book in a trilogy, The Lives of the Mayfair Witches, which includes the equally dense and detailed books Lasher and Taltos.

When I began my experiment with Warhol’s book, I didn’t know where it would lead or whether each page would amount to any poetry at all.

I don’t doubt that Rice’s work in the same way: Her writing gives a lot to choose from when creating any kind of erasure or found poetry. I think of this as a remix, where I am plucking words and phrases and stitching them together in a new way.

But I don’t know exactly what I will find as I do so: Will I be able to create poetry that feels resonant or revelatory in some way? Will I discover spells and witchcraft between the lines? Or will these pages prove to be better off left alone, as they are?

Only time will tell. But I hope you will follow me here to find out.