prose-ac

prose writing depends on everybody knowing your words… beginner novelists think the dictionary is the most important book to own. mature novelists would ask, ‘which dictionary?’

poets invent words. make a verbal pointer/structure work in your poem and it’ll be added to the dictionaries. kids think they should only used words the people use, that their poem should be for everyone, but that’s because they’re sharing themselves at word-motel and it’s not really about the words at all. you’ve heard that, haven’t you? that it’s not about the words, it’s about the feelings? — and, the only real feelings in the room belong to them, the poet? and, ‘aren’t you listening to my words??’ goes along with, ‘it’s whatever you want it to mean’ and, ‘yes, being a poet, being special, means sometimes you can get away with bedroom hair’.

that wonderful pomposity of ‘being a philosopher’

philosophy is done with words: philosophy is when you ask youself why you believe something. philosophy is the negation of belief, and nothing but that. it has to be done: you have to write a phrase you believe in and then shred that phrase — you never know what you’re talking about, but it always seems to work on even you. why is that?Image

got to be ok to have a place of your own, where your ideals ring whenever anyone hits you. ok to know that what you need to express can only be because there’s nothing else left.

what’s what with this blog…

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.’_L2Q8184

what is poetry writing?

_L2Q8184what is poetry writing? isn’t it what is left after you’ve written the poem? how do you know you’ve actually written one? is it because it works on someone else, or because it works according to what you think a poem should be?

doesn’t critique of your writing explain to you how you wrote? but, doesn’t this depend on a good critic — someone who’s as much a poet as you are…