pretending to be writing in time, when actually we’re inventing time. one dimension writing forces the reader to necessarily accept the writer’s limitations, to go along with what the writer presents as reality. a grocery list or a novel works just this way.

i’d like this to be a place where poets can talk honestly, poet to poet, about how a poem works and doesn’t work, why it ended up looking the way it does. i’d like it to be pretty hard-core: able to say when i thought something i wrote in a poem wasn’t totally conscious, wasn’t real — just put in for effect.

i’d like to discuss ‘effect’, and the difference between styling and shaping: following the course of your emotional expression, as against, making a poem seem cool.

sometimes cool is all i want, but i call that writing ‘verse,’ not ‘poetry — ‘verse’ because it’s just chatting for effect in rhythmic or melodic way… ‘saying something.’