Tag Archives: process

2023, essay, nonfiction, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, prose, the no-scape

A Brief Note on (Poetic) Composition

There are as many poetic craft and composition regimens as there are poets. Some have more ritualized processes than others. Some can only write in the morning. Some can only write late into the night. Some carve their time after supper and when the kids are in bed. Some write prolificly. Some are slow and steady crafters. Some write every day. Some only write when they feel properly inspired.

There are no writing practices that are more correct than others. They all work or don’t depending on the particular poet and their particular life.

Nearly all of my poems and 95% of my prose, including this bit, are written in the moment. I revise very little.

Lately I write in brief down times during my work day… raising steam or working the throttle on the Belle of Louisville tends to have a similar effect on my writing.

Sometimes I start out with the intention to focus on a particular style… a sonnet or a tanka or a ghazal or a haiku. Mostly I let the poem lead. Sometimes the poem allows me to lead. The relationship is an organic one.

There are times when the poems drive themselves daily and more often. Sometimes there’s a bit of gunk in the line, and the poems drive slower, or not at all, and not necessarily to my satisfaction. In that case, I revisit themes, the landscapes ajmnd geography of things I’ve written, or I read a new poet or I find an poet I’ve read before and I read them again. Sometimes I read something other than poetry.

So if there is an apparent haste in my poetry or it slows down in number or in quality, I generally don’t dwell. I just vent the burners and fire again.

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essay, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life

on process

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.

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