Monday night was a class night. We got thirty minutes of writing time, and, wouldn’t you know, I wrote the longest poem I have in one sitting so far. It came to two and a half pages, and just under two full pages typed up. Some things I noticed about the experience:
1 – Pressure. The pressure to produce, similar to when writing essays, forces some leaps in imagination. This of course results in interesting jumps.
2 – Revision. Revision begins almost the instant a word comes into the head. “No, not that, that’s not right… ok that works.” And then it continues once on the page: “That should be on the next line, and that’s not the right word at all, that’s spelled wrong, and those two words are syntax-inverted.”
3 – Recursion. The long poem begs for a pulling-in of a variety of sources and ideas… sometimes they get brought in and don’t come back… like a dangling modifier, they leave the reader hanging. Others recur and recur and recur and recur, others are just right.
4 – Narrative. Where is this thing going? Even if not a traditional story, the reader is going for a ride, and you have to take them somewhere…
I’ll add more as I think of them.
– Eric