Quote:
Originally Posted by John Riley
About this not being a new form. I was sitting around unable to write and it suddenly occurred to me: Just go write a poem the way I think the poem should be written. I want to write, not spend time picking a form. Just write and let the form pick me and if it's something I've done before so what? I need to write more than I want to work on different forms. I'll see what happens.
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I've gone through a similar process, the form emerges from how I want to express the idea.
A lot of your recent stuff strikes me as very prose like, and one possibility that you could try for fun is to break the text up into a different pattern or shape. Some of the prose I've written will end up in jagged pieces that emphasize certain passages, words, or phrases. This kind of idea:
Quote:
I shouldn’t have come to this meeting where people
are complaining about their lives
before whispering they’re grateful,
the force of the lie dropping their eyes
to the old church’s floor, where beneath
the waxed pine there is a cellar full of things
unseen and unsaid—
cracked vases that once held wilted Easter flowers,
children’s lost shoes and hats and the still-alive
searching fish waiting to be lifted by a net
and taken to the narrow river running below
the cellar floor, to swim away and search
for the promised peace, escape the arrangements
of earthly things sitting in stacked boxes
leaning between old lamps with gold tasseled shades,
cracked violins, rusted music stands, closed books,
all gathered under a too-blue sky
painted on the cellar’s ceiling,
a sky with no stars to triangulate.
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