🦋 Poetic process
I've been writing a lot of poetry lately (last week or two or three) -- if you've been reading the blog you have probably noticed... I thought I would just post a brief outline of the process I've been following. (Because: a key part of this process has been analysis, trying to understand what I am doing/seeking in writing the poetry, and how I am going about it. My instinct is that this kind of analysis should be stifling to creativity, but that has not been my experience, in this moment, not at all. The more I ask "why" and "how", the more it seems to work...)
Today I was riding my bike, for exercise and to do some errands. (Made it a little farther up Walker Street!) I was over by Vose and South Orange Ave. when a woman walked by and I overheard her saying to her friend, "Oh, I thought that was my car there by the corner -- we need to walk a little farther." This struck me as funny, and turning it over in my head I heard the first line of a silly poem. Riding along I started repeating this line in a sort of sing-song and it started fleshing itself out with more lines and a structure.... And that's basically how it usually happens, flowing out of a single line or couplet that I "hear" -- The composition works best when I am walking or riding bike, the rhythmic movement gives a background for the rise and fall of syllables (hmm: typing seems to do it too, a bit) that serves best as background for the composition process. A side effect of this is that when I'm reading the poem later on, it is easy to fall into that sing-song; the poem sounds better if I avoid this.
So once I've got a rough idea of the poem in mind, I write it out longhand, usually without division into lines -- the homemade notebook I got from Woody and Lisa has been serving me very well. Let it set a few hours or a few days and then I type it up with line divisions, often I will post it on the blog, usually it is nearly complete by that time -- each point of copying the poem, head to paper, paper to screen, screen to blog, involves revisions. And often I will see a couple of light edits that still need to be made after it has gone up on the blog.
Anyways: I am off to have some coffee and write out that poem. I'll post it later on as an update to this entry, assuming it comes together like I'm thinking it will.
 Update: Yes -- This one came together very quickly and easily. Little substance but some fun imagery.
Parking Lot
Forgetting where you’re parked, a pleasant exercise, I recommend it,
silly mindless feeling, walk around the parking lot with
bags of groceries, or books, or cat food, hardware that you bought to build
your latest home improvement project,
5# nails are clanking in the bag and in your mind
you see
a silver Nissan, license plate
you’ve seen so many times
the image crystal clear imagined,
in the back seat is the laundry that you mean to drop off yesterday
but didn’t, thought I parked it over here, indeed a car
that looks just like mine from a distance -- but it’s not,
and here’s the owner,
now he’s taking out his keys and starting off, I’m back to square one
and I dig back through my memory, I opened up the door
and as I looked over my shoulder saw a note forbidding tresspassing:
it warned illegal parkers would be ticketed, behind that
was a yellow sign; that yellow’s over this way now, so clearly
I was looking that way, must have been right here -- let’s see...
I turn and orient myself, I’m looking at my car.
posted morning of Saturday, June 18th, 2011
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