October 25, 2009

... more on fragments

Maybe, what I should be exploring as far as all these fragments go is, at what point do these become poems / poetic / poetry? Are they poems when they first pop into my head? or when time and effort and alcohol has been poured into them? or only once they reach final form?

I certainly have no problem exploring that liminal space where one thing resubstantiates as something entirely different. is there a specific threshold? or moment? or is it a transition we can watch?

Is it even something that I as creator can see? Can I see it in effect? or only in hindsight?

What happens when I define that boundary?

Do I then have to practice art aware of it? knowingly cross the event horizon?

if all is distilled into the final product, then does all that goes into the product become indistinguishable? mass, energy and gravity all become one at the point of singularity. in the cultural context, technology and the mind become irreversibly entwined...

can we draw back the veil on poetry and watch the photons cross the event horizon to become inextricably linked to the singularity? if we tear the singularity apart, and pick up the photons, and examine them, then is it still a singularity, or have we destroyed, now, some mysterious aspect that made the conglomeration a singularity?

Is absence of knowledge even a measurable aspect?

Ignorance certainly leads to many wrongs, many incompassionate ideals, many holy wars...

Ignorance also allows us to believe in magic.

Is poetry magic?

Is poetry science?

or some liminal space in between?

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October 25, 2009

A revision

This is from the poem Metronome that I fragmented earlier. After significant revision, it's come to this:

Audile, steady measure!  Evoke music!

you're a presence that moves my life along

at a steady tempo, tick after tick

and continues on. It's assumed quite a different tone, I think, and the meter is much more well defined I hope. Still not regularized as much as maybe it should be, being a sonnet, but, well, we all get to make artistic decisions, don't we? I'm really proud of the last two stanzas, but since we're not publishing things here, maybe I'll show them off later....

Maybe I should take these three lines from initial brain-dump to its current state? If anyone is interested I'd be happy to explore my methods more closely.

emrw

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October 16, 2009

What the fragments are about

So, all these posts I have and will be putting up about "fragments" are:

1 - I don't think that the creative process in writing poetry is out there enough. I guess I want to disabuse the notion that it is easy to write something new and wonderful and beautiful that people can (hopefully) relate to, and by enlightening my own creative processing, I hope to start a dialogue on the topic in some fashion.

2 - I like getting feedback on my work, but don't want to "publish" any whole poem myself on the web, because then I can't send it out to get published for real... So, fragments of drafts. Each of these are snippets of a longer poem (sometimes much), are actively being worked on at the time of the poem, and should be expected to change in some way (sometimes very significantly).

3 - Let's be honest, I'm also hoping some editor from The New Yorker, Poetry, or some other esteemed magazine runs across these and finds them interesting enough to ask for the rest of it. Course, in the real world... well, the full versions are still being sent to those publications more accepting of newcomers than the illustrious ones mentioned.

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