Tuesday, March 31, 2015

NaPoWriMo Eve

I'll keep this post short, at least relative to my usual verbosity.  Tomorrow will be the first National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) post, of thirty to come this month.  In the last week or so I've been playing with ideas, taking notes, and generally working to simultaneously open my senses to the world around me and turn myself inside out to reflect on what I see. 

This is hard work.  As the saying goes, the reason someone writes a two-page report is that he does not have time to write a one-page report.  A poem represents that one-page report, compacted and restructured 137 times.  Creating a good poem means making every word count, and placing it in exactly the right context, with the right tone and structure underlying it all.

Even more, my usual process involves playing with an idea in my mind for weeks before I start composing.  Once I start, I draft the poem and sculpt it until I feel I've done all I can with it.  Then, I leave it alone for a week or two, to intentionally separate myself from the poem before coming back as a reader.  Finally, I work through it from that perspective and either (a) fine-tune it, (b) overhaul it, or (c) scrap it entirely.

Obviously, this approach does not yield a poem a day.  In fact, the poems that went into Declaration took years to complete.  For the next month, that will be the point.  Achieving this will require taking chances and pushing poetry out in ways that fall far outside my comfort zone.  I like being comfortable, but I hope that this exercise leads to poetry more raw than my usual.

Finally, as the point of this blog remains working to improve writing, I will offer discussion of the poetry along the way: discussion of choices I make and why, with an eye toward beginning to demystify the process of writing, as well as poetry itself.  This requires some delicacy, as part of the joy of reading poetry lies in exploring a poem.  But I hope, by the end of the month, both to have grown as a poet and given some insight into what I'm thinking as I write it.

1 comment:

  1. Jeff, I know...I'm doing this ack basswards...but wanted to offer you encouragement if for no other reason than new, raw works of prose will titillate my secret quest to master the oral art of poetry. It does wonders for my ego...

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