I’ve been asked to talk about my process a little bit, especially in relation to one poem from my October-end series, “one must:”

one must

imagine thus roll 
ng happy up 
all dead kings 
shit rot belch 
like like 
Dogman Bry 
dry bye thus 
one must imagine 
him happy roll 
ng up hill

Discussing my writing process as a process isn’t that complicated. There’s a lot of word play and random adventure in my process. Unless I set out to write a sonnet, for example, I don’t adhere to form much. I do like COMPACT poems. But I’ve written damn epic-sized ones, too (though it’s been a while).

Sometimes something I’m reading turns itself into an idea. This morning I read an academic article about the poetry culture in Cincinnati before WWII and George Elliston, which has set my mind in a certain direction I suppose. This poem came from one of my favorite Camus quotes: One must imagine Sisyphus happy. I think this a lot in my jobby job. It makes me laugh even when my level of physical pain isn’t funny at all. 

Sometimes I wake up with a word or  phrase tumbling around in my head. Sometimes I just sit down empty-headed and my brain dumps out disarticulated sentence trees. I almost always revise and tinker from the journal to the screen. And sometimes I tinker and revise over a week or month… but lately I’ve been letting them go either on my channels or submitting them to  various publications within a few weeks.

I don’t like to sit still, creatively. I ruminate and plod on my own too much about too many other things to let that seep into my process. I trust the language. We’re both flawed. In the end all a poet has is their relationship to language.

Process is easy to talk about. Wordage hand written on page, then tinkered with, typed, tinkered with some more, sometimes typed again if play with an old typer I like to use. A single poem may go through 4-7 iterations. Or none.

The other part of writing… the murky part… that’s what can be difficult to discuss, mostly because it’s the stuff that happens in my imagination, which I understand as a sense in same way that taste, touch, smell, see, and sound are senses. And that probably deserves its own post.