On Structure and Restriction

Writing a sonnet is (fundamentally, at least for me) about creation within structure. It is about allowing the constraints and requirements of the form to shape but not dictate the work that you are doing and the expression of your ideas. It is about finding the parts of an idea that can be constructed into the sonnet form. In a sense then, any poem can be or could be recast as a sonnet if the ideas and emotions contained within it can be reforged.

This is the reason that I hold so firmly to my belief in certain restrictions on the sonnet. I believe that sonnets should have 14 lines. I believe that sonnets must rhyme. I believe that sonnets must have meter. It is of course possible to think that some of these restrictions can be relaxed or that some of them could be tightened. The name of this blog of course suggests iambic pentameter or at the very least some 10 syllable line in a 14 line poem to make 140 syllables. And yet many of the sonnets on this blog use iambic tetrameter and I have not renamed the blog to 112syllables. similarly there are poems on this blog that use extremely unusual rhyme schemes, though I believe there are no unrhymed sonnets on the blog. 

The point for me is that there needs to be a certain level of restriction; and for me the quantity of lines, the consistency of meter, with (historically) the one exception of the final couplet, and the use of a consistent rhyme scheme where every line has a rhyme somewhere in the poem are those restrictions. I cannot and do not object to others viewing this differently, but I think it is relevant to considering the creative process of writing a sonnet to factor in the restrictions that should be placed on it. I find that this also permits certain types of analysis based on the choice of rhyme scheme and meter and their interaction with the 14 line structure. 

There are also of course sonnet traditions. Thus a poem that is or is adjacent to a Petrarchan sonnet has different restrictions and should be analyzed differently than one that approaches the Shakespearean sonnet tradition or the Spenserian or that creates its own rhyme structure entirely. The turn, for instance, is a common element in sonnets but it's placement, effect, and connection to the rest of the poem are elements that can be moved around depending on the tradition or the invention of the author. but operating within the general restriction of the sonnet or the more specific restriction of a son of tradition (for me) brings meaning both to the creation and the analysis of the sonnet.

On Sincerity in the Ironic Age

I have done a lot of thinking this past couple of years about sincerity and its role in poetry. Some of this has made it onto the blog in the past. But recently I have had newer thoughts, and I think it worthwhile to put fingers to keys again to try and define it a little.

Poetry must be sincere. That is not to say it must be factual; poems of the fantastic, the imagined, and the unreal have a place, and as I have suggested before, I believe that often the best poetry even about factual things has an element of imagination to it that makes it not entirely factual in the most prosaic sense. But poetry must be sincere; that is, it must engage seriously with its topic, it must care about what it has to say, and it must attempt to do justice to those things.

But wait. I should back up. Poetry should have a topic!

For me, poetry is a paradox. It is the intentional use of (frequent) complexity, (often) difficult language, and (always) stylized form to achieve clarity. That sounds more complex than I mean it, so I will try again: poetry uses complex means to make things simple. I have no love for "poetry" that seeks to be intentionally confusing, obfuscating, or simply amorphous. Poetry, at its best, has something to say, or at least something to talk about, and uses its nature as poetry to make that thing clearer, or at least better understood.

So yes, poetry should have a topic. Poetry should have a point - not a point as in a political message, necessarily, but a point, a reason for existing beyond its own mere narcissism. Ars gratia artis indeed, but art for the sake of what the art is, not art for the sake of merely making art. The point need not be anything major; I write poems to describe the weather, for goodness' sake, and you cannot get much more stereotypically minor. I write poems about writing poems! But there must be a there there.

In turn, I believe this means poetry must take a turn - an intentional, definite turn - towards sincerity and away from the ironic, meta, and post-meta ways of the world we live in. Poetry is (usually) shit when it tries to conform to that sort of thought process; poetry that tries to be post-post-post ends up childlike and silly, in the worst senses. Poetry should strive to be sincere, not necessarily in a stereotyped, "Victorian" sense of pathos, or a self-consciously post-ironic sense of "sincere," but simply sincere, honest, forthright. It is important to care, to be interested in the poem and in its subject, and to strive to put these things together in a meaningful way.

On Stretching Meanings

Poetry has some flexibility with the language, naturally, in the service of art. Just how much can be a question though, obviously. For example, if you look one post before this, the sonnet there rhymes "ruth" with "truth." This in itself is not objectionable: they rhyme. But is "ruth" really the emotion demanded by, or even an emotion permitted by, the rest of the poem? Ruth means pity, compassion, sorrow, grief, the emotions felt by Ruth the Moabite towards her mother-in-law Naomi in the Biblical Book of Ruth after their mutual widowhood. The poem is about romantic love. How far can one stretch "ruth," with all its sorrowful, pitying connotations (and even direct definitions!) to fit that mold?

The first cast in that direction is grammatical: "ruth" is joined with "And tenderness" in the following line, which means that we must take a form of ruth that can join with tenderness. But all of the definitions I've placed above can do so: grief and tenderness may be the furthest apart, but they are by no means absurd when joined. Rather, the absurdity in all these cases arises from the sense that the poem wants "ruth" to mean something like a synonym for tenderness, not just a complement. So this move does not help, although in other contexts it might.

Building on that, though, we can ask if there is a fringe definition - archaic, obsolete, historical-linguistic - that is allowable but unintuitive and might make sense of "ruth." This is for instance how one most often deals with John Milton's excessive Latinism: go back to his Latin roots and define the parts until you see how it works beyond ordinary English usage. Here we are on firmer ground: if we take "ruth" in its formative sense as related to the sympathetic and self-effacing love Ruth felt for Naomi, we could make that work.

This, however, brings us close to the borderline of complete redefinition: taking the word Humpty-Dumpty-style and making it mean what you say it means. This should generally be avoided except when coining the word for the first time, and even then it ought to be a meaning suggested by the sound or component parts of the word. It is a real stretch, which can easily break a poem, to go too far out on the redefinition limb.

As for "ruth," you tell me: did it go too far? I am personally just barely satisfied with it: the difficulty of that rhyme compensates somewhat for the effort needed to define it (if the rhyme were something ending in an -ee sound, there would be no excuse since there are so many rhymes), and the root meaning is there, if somewhat faintly. Ruth's love for Naomi is the central motivator of the word, and it is that sort of overwhelming, non-self-oriented love - which sometimes seems like pity and can in fact be called compassion in one sense of that word - that the poem wanted and needed from the word. But I am not the arbiter of my own poetry: the reader is. So what do you think?

Further on the Blog as a Medium for Sonnets

This past week I quietly passed five hundred sonnets posted to this blog. Or rather, very loudly passed it, because every sonnet is in some sense shouted into the world, but the actual passing was unremarkable.

Think about that, if you will: five hundred sonnets in September through January (with a tiny smidgen of February tacked on). And how many of those sonnets are getting read? Well, thankfully I know some of you out there read what I post - but how about the next day? How many of those sonnets are read after they scroll down out of the main page and into the archive?

I should be clear: this is in no way a complaint about my readership or about any of you who are reading this. I am immensely grateful and honestly somewhat surprised that people do actually read this blog, especially given the long stretches (necessary to reach 500 sonnets, I suppose) when it is nothing but my poetry. Rather, it is a musing about what it means to write poetry in this ephemeral-and-yet-permanent form.

A sonnet that is handwritten, or even printed, has a tactile existence; it can be passed around, anthologized, and so on; a sonnet online can be read and anthologized as well, I suppose, but it has a strange tendency to drop out of sight even though it is still recoverable, because it does not possess the odd urgency of physicality. If I have a book of sonnets, it asks to be read; it has an insistence that is in some way tied up with its physical existence. If I read one of those sonnets, there is a sense in which the very existence of the book asks me to read more - indeed, to read them all. If they exist, as these exist, in a cloud, online, do they have the same insistent urgency? Do they have a continuity, a collective existence that passes from one to another?

It seems to me that in some way they do not. Let me give some (probably statistically useless, but illustrative) examples. Of all the posts on this blog, the introduction to the sonnet has the most hits. My analysis of Horace Smith's "Ozymandias" has the second-most. They each have substantially more than any sonnet; in fact, together they have more than the top eight sonnets combined, and when you include my other analysis the gap grows (although since approximately 90% of the posts on the blog are sonnets, they do eventually make up the gap using the power of the long tail).

So the sonnets slip off the radar screen relatively quickly; they don't tend to be reread much. And of course (and again this is not a complaint, merely an observation) they rarely get commented on individually. So that raises the question of how valuable it is to have them as an archive, artistically speaking, as well as how I am to know which models to follow, since there is so little spread in their readership.

But the larger question it seems to me is the one about the sonnets themselves as a form. Traditionally, poems are edited - something I think I may have mentioned that I don't do much of - and possibly collated, and definitely considered. That is to say, they are intended to be looked at deeply, possibly (or probably) receiving multiple readings, and thought about at some length. By contrast, the blog model typically suggests, despite the presence of the archive, a sense of rapid motion on from one to the next, and a discarding of that which lies in the past. Given my own profligate writing style and the design inherent in the blog, it appears that the latter model is winning out: I produce poems as dissimilar as this, this, and this, and yet they fall equally into the same chronologically rigid trap. They fall off the front page and languish; when on the front page, they most likely are read once, quickly, to get onto the next in my prolific and unreasonable output, albeit I admit I have no direct evidence for that (although the stats on time-spent-on-pages suggest so).

This in turn raises the question of whether the sonnet has to, or ought to, or even can, change to accommodate or interact with this different model. Or does the model of reading change the sonnet without changing the words? Does the reader's different interaction with the poem in the different context make it a different poem? In some way, certainly, but I cannot help but think that in some way the medium does not fundamentally alter the sonnet, because the opportunity for reading in that style was available before; the likelihood of that reading style may have changed, but it cannot mean in any useful sense that the sonnet changed just because a different proportion of the readership reads it in different ways. But should the sonnet as written change? Is there an ideal way to write a sonnet with the knowledge of how it will be consumed? I cannot say at this point, although I would love to have some form of dialogue (rather than this mere monologue) about it.

I can say, I think, that the way I write sonnets has not actually fundamentally changed. I wrote them before, whether in Notepad, Wordpad, or Word, whether on a computer, in a notebook, or on a receipt grabbed from my pocket, and whether in ink, graphite, or digital bit, in the moment the mood struck me to write, in the way the poem came to me in that instant, and with a desperate sense of urgency. That is still true, but now they go on the blog, and sometimes do so after finding their way into one of those other forms first. So the process has not changed, although the later distribution has (and I no longer have to have a working pen or unbroken pencil with me, which is nice). Therefore the questions linger: should they change? And how, I suppose, as a corollary?

I wish I had answers, but I think the first step is identifying and considering the questions.

On Emotion in Poetry

So one obvious question that arises when I declare that I am interested in the process of crystallizing experience into poems is whether the poems that I write honestly reflect the emotions I experience; a related question is whether they are topical, that is to say tied to a single emotional moment. I have dealt with the former question to some degree previously. I will now endeavor to discuss the latter - with a touch of the former - in a bit more depth.

I certainly used to write completely topical poetry. I began writing sonnets because I was writing them to my then-girlfriend. They were about her. They were unabashedly about her (well, after my initial abashedness at writing them in general had faded, at any rate). They were clearly topical.

Since then, I will not claim to have completely abandoned topical poetry. It has its place; usually the poems I write in this way are exhortations of some kind, to help my friends or myself get through something. Sometimes they are observational, like about the weather or otherwise about nature. It is much more, I might say vanishingly, rare that they are about my personal emotions.

The reason for this is that I have come to what I think is a better place as regards writing the poetry of emotion. I used to, and to a certain extent I still do, believe that William Wordsworth's famous claim in the preface to Lyric Ballads that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility" was false, or at least strongly overblown. However, I have come much closer than I ever would have expected to this position. I believe that poetry is best as a synthesis between remembered, felt, and imagined emotion.

Specifically, that means that poetry draws on emotions that were felt in the past, and the recollection of not only how they felt then but how they developed (in retrospect) over time; on emotions being felt in the moment of creation and how they feel then, and how they are recognized to have grown in the immediate past; and on emotional intuition regarding how others feel, how the writer may or will feel in the future, and how one might feel about something that is counterfactual. All three of these streams and their subdivisions can and should be sluiced together. A poem that relies too strongly on any one of the three, or particularly any one subset of any of the three, risks weakness and especially risks feeling shallow, insubstantial, or restricted.

The goal of this combination is to produce a poem that speaks as generally as possible while retaining a link back to the initial generative thought - whether that thought was imaginative, immediate, or memorial. If one begins by recalling emotion, one should also search one's current state for links to that emotion, and begin to contemplate imaginatively what that emotion might do or mean; if one begins in the moment, one should recall past experience and also move through the imagination towards a broader understanding of the moment; and if one begins with the imagination, one should always attempt to ground the feeling in something remembered or currently felt. The combination of these processes will lead to a general poem on a specific event, whether, as above, that event is an actual occurrence (recalled or immediately lived) or an imaginative act. The important point is that the poem both connect to the triggering thought and to the wider world or wider range of experience in the world.

So it is for this reason that, although there is a reason for writing every poem, I would no longer say that my poems, especially my poems about emotion, are truly topical or occasional. They are related to some triggering event, yes, but they partake much more generally in my experience and my imagination. They are general poems, even as they have a topic.

On the Blog as a Medium for Sonnets

So a question that constantly occurs to me as I write this blog is what the medium of the blog means for and does to the poetry I produce on it. This question, for me, breaks down into the following parts: what does it mean to make poetry ephemeral, as each day's poem is superseded on the front page by the next's? What does it mean, conversely, to have every poem searchable and archived? What does it mean to have so much poetry produced so quickly, and none of it edited? And finally, what does it do to have such a formal poetic form placed into the context of such a modern medium?

What does it mean to make poetry ephemeral?

This is probably the question that worries me the most, or perhaps not worries me but nags at me. I write a lot of poetry here, as you know if you take even a glance at my archive or even at the front page. But each one, whether good or bad, whether a labor of lengthy love or the work of a moment, whether precious to me or not, drops off the radar incredibly rapidly - and at the same rate. Who reads the archive? And if you do read the archive, how do you know which poem to read? In this sense, the medium portrays the poetry as if it were all created equal, which it manifestly is not. But because every poem disappears from view, never to return, there is no way to keep the best poems around, or, therefore to produce improvement in the poems by recognizing success or failure and keeping the examples of each before one's eyes. The poems become mere ripples in the stream, and lose their solid presence. Poems are meant, in some sense, to stand as "a moment's monument," in Dante's words, or "marble or the gilded monuments/of princes" in Shakespeare's. How can the poem be a monument, how can it immortalize anything, if it itself is ravaged by time, and indeed ravaged more rapidly than the physical objects to which it is compared? Does a poem lose something of its identity, of that crystalline quality that I desire it to have, if it disappears soon after its creation?

I hope, and think, the answer is that it does not. After all, if I write poetry in a book, or in a Word document, or in any other format, is it presented to the world any more than it is at the bottom of my archive here? Certainly not, and indeed, it is less available, less noticeable, less useful. Of course, if I were to write my poetry in another medium, I could collate and correct it before publishing it to somewhere it could be read by others; but equally, there would be a good chance that the poems might become permanently voided because I lost them, forgot about them, or simply refused to show them. How can this medium be considered more ephemeral than that? The apparent ephemerality of the poems is simply an artifact of the fact that all the poems I write (with few exceptions) are available here, and therefore the constant stream of them, and their constantly visible renewal, makes each one looks less important. Yet I would write the poems in any case, and they are certainly no less important and no more ephemeral here.

But, on the other hand, what does it mean to have them all archived?

The flip side of the above point is that, unlike other media, this medium provides a searchable, browsable archive of everything I've produced. Certainly from a personal standpoint this is both a good thing, as I have easy access to my work, and a frightening thing, as whatever personal truth is contained in the poems is not only publicly available, but available with its own history tagging along behind it. It is rather difficult to escape one's past in such a context. But I am more concerned here with a poetic, artistic level than a personal one, to the extent that they can be divorced, and on that side the issue is more the one identified above, that the archive is undifferentiated and therefore not ideal to use. So it is less useful than it could be; if I could find a way to differentiate the poems by quality, or by audience response (which I suppose could be achieved by comments), then the presence of the archive would become a much greater tool for poetic development. It does however tie me, however usefully, to my poetic past; it leaves the exploration of my poetic development, however achieved, open to the willing eye. At the moment this is only an archive of the past few months, along with spotted moments of My Old Sonnets, but if I continue it will grow and become both more useful and more interesting as a record of my poetic past, and of how I have developed as a poet.

What does it mean to have so much poetry, so quickly, without editing?

This jockeys with the first question for my attention, and indeed they are closely related. The role of editing in poetry is one that I have struggled with. I write my poems very rapidly, almost compulsively, and though I do edit them in the process of writing them it is very hard for me to edit them afterwards unless it is long afterwards. It is not, as it might seem to be, an issue of excess of passion, but rather an issue of being too close to the moment of creation; a sonnet that has just passed hot out of the forge of my brain needs time to cool before it can be reshaped. Or at least before I can reshape it. So in a sense, editing would not happen even if I were in another medium, just because of who I am and how I write.

Yet the blog medium is, admittedly, peculiarly unfriendly to editing, especially compared to other electronic media, such as simply typing in Word. The archive moves on so quickly, and posts that are edited themselves do not pop up on the frontpage but rather wherever the original was in the archive. So the tendency is simply to forge on, rather than to go back, and even if one does go back the edited poem is invisible unless reposted. So there is a distinct pressure to move onward, ever onward.

This in turn leads towards greatly increased poetic production in terms of numbers of poems. I have written well over three hundred sonnets for this blog. Petrarch wrote, or at least published, that many sonnets in his entire life; Shakespeare, less than half as many. This is certainly not to claim a position for myself alongside those two poets, but rather to point out the effect, in some ways, of the medium's constant push for novelty rather than reworking of old material. I am, and in some sense must be, continually presenting new sonnets and new work, and therefore exceed greatly the standards of quantitative production traditional for the sonnet. This is accelerated by the way in which the medium interacts with editing; otherwise I might perhaps spend more time producing better work out of the materials already at hand rather than creating anew.

What does it mean to have a formal, traditional form in a modern medium?

Besides the production point addressed above, the interaction of something so old, traditional, almost arcane as the sonnet with the slambang speed of the Internet interests me. This is perhaps particularly true because of the traditional approach I take to the sonnet (nothing without consistent meter and rhyme, please!). The speed and almost sloppiness allowed by the medium interact interestingly with the precision demanded by the form. I can push out the sonnet as fast as I can write it, technically speaking, but I can only write it as quickly as I can find the right words to fit the form; the form, and not the medium, is the constraint, the limiting factor, which is substantially different than it is when I write by hand, and even in some ways different than when I type into something like Word (because then there is a lag in publication, which permits more editing - see above - which in turn makes the form itself no longer the limiting factor). This has probably contributed in turn to my facility with the form, but it has also created a situation in which there is no automatic check that allows me to edit as I go along by making me pause as I compose, since the composition can flow as rapidly as it likes and be immediately posted. This in turn must have an impact on what eventually gets published, as there is less of a space for contemplation of the production either during or immediately after the process.

Parallel Poetry Demonstration

So occasionally a line arrives in my head, only to be followed quickly by another line formed almost exactly on the same lines (usually because I somehow temporarily forget the first and recreate it inexactly). Sometimes I like only one, sometimes neither, sometimes both. But I thought it might be interesting to create poems off of the two that just occurred to me, commenting as I go and showing (possibly) how slight initial differences in rhythm or diction can lead to different poems, as well as how I write a sonnet.

First Lines:
My poetry is parenthetical

My poems are all parenthetical

These are clearly almost the same line. The differences lie in rhythm - the first flows faster because there are fewer words that hit the stresses more firmly, while the second has that "all" that wants stress it can't have - and diction, where "poetry" implies the generality and "poems...all" emphasizes the discrete products.

Second Lines:
My poetry is parenthetical;
It hides inside the corners of my life

My poems are all parenthetical;
They hide inside the corners of my life

So we again have a singular/plural distinction: one is giving us a sense of immanence, with poetry hiding everywhere, the other of secrecy, with individual poems waiting to be discovered, or hoping not to be.

Now we speed up.

Octave:
My poetry is parenthetical;
It hides inside the corners of my life.
If I were settled, with a loving wife
And children, I think it is possible
I would not write it. My rhetorical
Flourishes exist to mirror strife
And flicker on the edges of a knife,
Not in a happy home, which is too full

My poems are all parenthetical;
They hide inside the corners of my life.
If I were settled with a loving wife
And children, I think it is possible
I would not write them. I would be too full
Of other thoughts, for happiness is rife
With great distractions, and it lacks the strife
That opens space for poems. As I mull

So first: yes, I pronounce all the A rhymes the same way. I was as surprised as you.

Now we really see the difference between the poems. While I will concede I could force either octave onto either opening, I feel these differences flowed naturally from the differences in the openings. "Poetry," which had a faster flow and a sense of immanent, immaterial poetry, slides easily into general thoughts about not writing "it" and about the "rhetorical/flourishes" that make up my poetry. It wants to talk generally, and talk about how I write, the characteristics of my "poetry." And it does so with only one sentence break, smoothly. "Poems" is jerkier, with an additional sentence break, and it takes a different tack. It is not as interested in broad poetic strokes, but in the "space for poems" and being "too full." Poems hiding in the corners need space; poetry can exist at the same time as whatever might fill those corners. "Poems" is interested in the mind and how it juggles multiple inputs; "Poetry" in the situations that produce different effects.

Beginning Sestet:
My poetry is parenthetical;
It hides inside the corners of my life.
If I were settled, with a loving wife
And children, I think it is possible
I might not write it. My rhetorical
Flourishes exist to mirror strife
And flicker on the edges of a knife
Not in a happy home, which is too full
Of other thoughts that dampen that raw sense
Which touches poetry. If all is light,
Where are the shadows which inspire song?

My poems are all parenthetical;
They hide inside the corners of my life.
If I were settled, with a loving wife
And children, I think it is possible
I could not write them. I would be too full
Of other thoughts, for happiness is rife
With great distractions, and it lacks the strife
That opens space for poems. As I mull
That possibility, I ask myself
If that could make me happy. Could I be
Satisfied with life too full to write?

Obviously the differences have widened, partly because the end rhyme needed for "Poems" threw it in a new direction, partly because "Poetry" had not actually caught up to "Poems" and it's thoughts about "other thoughts." Each is going for a three-rhyme sestet, but the themes have clarified their differences: one is about situations, and the other space, even as both are obsessed with when the narrator would not write a poem.

Finish:
My poetry is parenthetical;
It hides inside the corners of my life.
If I were settled, with a loving wife
And children, I think it is possible
I would not write it. My rhetorical
Flourishes exist to mirror strife
And flicker on the edges of a knife
Not in a happy home, which is too full
Of other thoughts that dampen that raw sense
That touches poetry. If all is light,
Where are the shadows that inspire song?
But if I were to penetrate the fence
Surrounding happiness, I fear it might
Make both the joy and poetry go wrong.

My poems are all parenthetical;
They hide inside the corners of my life.
If I were settled, with a loving wife
And children, I think it is possible
I would not write them. I would be too full
Of other thoughts, for happiness is rife
With great distractions, and it lacks the strife
Which opens space for poems. As I mull
That possibility, I ask myself
If that could make me happy. Could I be
Satisfied with life too full to write?
If all my poems pile on the shelf,
Or even lie unwritten? Such a sight,
I think, would scare the joyfulness from me.

And we're done. "Poems" ends frightened of the lack of space; "Poetry," worried that everything, not just the poetry might fail. Neither optimistic, but not nearly the same. The rhymes in "Poetry," which was always more direct, run CDECDE, where "Poems," always more jerky, is CDECED. Even the endings, each in fear or worry, differ according to how the beginnings did: one concerned with space, joy being "from me," and the other situations as a whole, with both "joy" and "poetry" being utterly spoiled. I think these changes flow logically from the initial small differences, and I think they are each a good reflection of the initial mindset of their first lines.

On Writer's Block

This blog updates multiple times a day, usually with new sonnets, occasionally but rarely with a more substantial post of analysis, definition, or simple explanation. The author (hey, that's me!) also writes rather a lot that does not go on this blog, particularly for his peculiar mode of employment. This means that he is well-acquainted with that strange bugbear that alights on all writers at some if not at all times, writer's block. And now, abandoning the third person, I shall write about writer's block as it applies, at least in my experience, to the sonnet.

Despite the profusion of poetry I post here, I have definitely gone through writer's block on this blog. If you're looking for when, look for a decrease in both the quality and the quantity of the sonnets that come up. I assure you you will find it. I find that in relation to sonnets, writer's block particularly manifests itself in the following ways: the inability to find rhymes, the inability to count syllables, the inability to make stresses line up, the inability to find a topic, and the inability to conclude a poem.

The first three categories are all fundamentally similar: the inability to put together the basic building blocks of the sonnet, viz. rhyme and meter. To work myself out of these sorts of blocks, I usually beat my head against a brick wall, by which I do not mean doing actual physical harm to myself but rather simply rewriting the line I'm working on maniacally until it comes out and the problem breaks. Sometimes I simply put the poem down and go do something else. But when I'm being particularly clever, which is rarely, there are two tricks I use. For meter, I start using monosyllables: it's very difficult for monosyllables to get away from you either in syllable count or stress placement, since they don't come in battalions but only as single spies, and they each take their own stress. Sometimes some monosyllables, particularly prepositions, are not too happy about being stressed near more important words, but since this technique ends up with them being surrounded by other monosyllables, the worst that usually happens is a trochaic substitution, which is perfectly fine. These lines tend to trip off the tongue in rhythm like a nursery rhyme, but that's OK; the rhythm is back, and the problem has usually broken. For rhyme, my trick is to screw with the rhyme scheme. Was I doing ABBAABBA? Not anymore. Now it's ABBCACAB! ABCCBA! Whatever works for this current line sense-wise will go there, and the rest will all come out in the wash. This is highly effective earlier in the poem, and still effective later; there's nothing that says your ABBAABBA poem can't end with a couplet, or that an ABABCDCD poem can't have an interwoven sestet. And since it allows you to finish the line you're working on with whatever feels right, it usually breaks the stressful part of writer's block, the inability to get a single line down on paper.

Topic difficulties are common to all types of writing. With sonnets, I find that love (especially unrequited love), the weather, and whatever I happen to be looking at are all particularly easy themes to simply splotch down and let run off on their own. Once the poem gets rolling on that topic, it may switch midway through poetic alchemy; that's perfectly OK. But the great advantage of a formal poetic style like a sonnet is that it actually lends itself very well to certain, well-worn and stereotypical themes. Sure, a sonnet can be about anything; but it can also be about the things sonnets are always about, and there's no crime in that either. Both sides of that equation are freeing when you are faced with writer's block.

As for the last issue; conclusions are hard. If it's a couplet that I'm having trouble with, I will sometimes do as I said to do with rhyme and just change the scheme: EFEFGG can be EFEFEF very easily. If the difficulty is that I have too much to say in too little space, I either go back and edit the preceding 1-4 lines of the poem, or I give up on definitive conclusions for a cheap fallback of uncertainty, which is almost always easy to squeeze into a few lines because it does not require tying up loose ends. I have also been known to change how I was planning to conclude, either making a poem have an unexpected twist or making it not have one I had originally planned. Finally, when both rhyme and sense are being a bother, I try to set myself up with fourteen or twelve syllables left (that is, fill the last line with six or eight syllables and then a piece of punctuation), put an "I" plus a verb at the end of the penultimate line, and rush through the last line to a conclusion that either rhymes with the verb (in a couplet) or with the appropriate previous line (while the verb also rhymes with its line, in a non-couplet situation). And the verb may change as that happens. That's my default way of ending a sonnet, particularly one with a couplet, and it will get you out of a lot of difficult places; even, sometimes, out of writer's block.

On Aesthetics and Fictional Poetry

I have mentioned before the difficulty in writing fictional sonnets. At that time I suggested that aesthetics might present an acceptable reason and model for deviating from reality. I will now expound on this subject at slightly greater length.

A sonnet - or any poem - can be understood on more levels than I wish to engage with at the moment. But for the present discussion it is important to pay attention to two of these ways: aesthetically and narratively. Both of these ways affect the ultimate goal of our understanding here, namely the emotional pull of the poem on the reader.

To understand a poem narratively is to enter into it through the path presented, unsurprisingly, by its narrative: what does the poem say, what does it say happened, how does it feel about what happened? The poem is interpreted through these questions, and the emotional impact of the poem relies on the interaction between the narrator, the narrative, and the reader. A sad tale will (hopefully) produce sadness in the reader, a happy one happiness, an eerie one a sense of eeriness; and the poem is sad, happy, or eerie depending on how the narrator presents the narrative to the reader. This is a useful, valuable, and important method of interpretation, and, in a broad sense, my own primary one. Under this method, a fictional poem can easily fall flat because the poet has difficulty negotiating the narrator/narrative interaction due to the distance set up between the poet and the narrator. This will not necessarily happen, and most of the other methods of writing fictional poetry mentioned earlier attempt to finesse this difficulty.

But an aesthetic understanding of the poem can avoid this difficulty entirely. Aesthetic interpretation enters the poem not through the narrative, but through the feel, sound, and appearance of the words. This does not mean that aesthetic poetry ignores the creation of a narrative any more than a narrative interpretation requires the abandonment of good aesthetics. But, aesthetically understood, poetry cares not about how the poet negotiates his relationship with the narrator or narrative, only about how the music, the taste, and the beauty of the words come across; effects that may even be made easier by the use of invention, as the possible ideal of accuracy is no longer present as a bar to aesthetic word choice.

I think it is clear from the foregoing that understanding poetry through aesthetics removes, or at least lowers, a potential barrier to the creation of fictional poetry. A poet may easily range beyond his or her own experience and emotions when the focus is on the beauty of the poem rather than the relatability of the narrative. Poetry understood as fine art in the sense of music or the visual arts rather than drama is substantially freer from the chains of reality - and such an understanding can lead to delightful, beautiful poetry.

On the Crap/Quality Ratio

This blog receives poetry as I write it - I mentioned in an earlier post that I often write the sonnets like a text message on my phone - without further editing than what I do while composing the first draft. That means that the sonnets on this blog are irregular (as you have probably noticed if you read it) in their themes, style, form, and, most importantly for this post, their quality. This raises the obvious question of how the production of good pieces and bad pieces relate to each other, and particularly the measurement I am interested in here, which deserves a better name than the crap/quality ratio.

In the production of any art there are going to be duds as well as successes. Without the fearlessness that allows duds to be created and shown to the world, successful art is unlikely to be produced; and certainly it would not be without the desire to create art, which can, perhaps regrettably, produce bad art as well as good. The question then is not whether crap will come out, but how much crap, and how much quality will be created as its byproduct.

Personally, I am willing to accept a very high ratio of crap to quality; I am not sure if I am a fundamentalist of the sort who believes that a single piece of quality art justifies infinite crap, but I might be, and I'm certainly close. Total duds can be ignored; quality is rare enough that it should be prized. The only hesitation I have in this regard is the context in which the art is being presented; if anyone is being required to engage with the art, subjecting people to an endless stream of unavoidable crap becomes more questionable. In any medium - including this blog - in which there is choice involved in the consumption of the art, I think it is clear that breadth of room for art to develop is to be preferred to a low crap/quality ratio.

Besides, there are two allied concerns with any attempt to restrict what art is presented: subjectivity, and flawed art. Art appreciation is subjective, so any great restriction of its dissemination based entirely on the quality of the art involved may be an unfair imposition of one party's subjective values on another party (I do not here include not passing art on to others because you did not enjoy it; I mean institutionalized or universal barriers to dissemination based on quality - the crucial distinction, I think, is between being not required to disseminate and being not permitted to do so).

But art can also fall between a total dud piece of crap and a high-quality masterpiece. Art with flaws but also with quality must be allowed, and too great of a restriction on non-masterpiece production is, in my opinion, a mistake. If there is any cutoff at all, it should be as close to total dud level as possible.

To turn back to this blog and the question of editing with which we began, I do not intend to say I do not believe in editing. It can improve art; it can be crucially important to art. But equally I do not believe that art should be presented only in an edited or polished form. There are distinctly rough drafts here, and some which seem more polished; at some point in the future I may even present edited versions of sonnets which have appeared before. But part of the purpose of this blog, and a major part of my writing process, is the presentation of poetry immediately upon its conception and production; and I would appreciate any and all comments that might help me identify where I fall on the continuum of the crap/quality ratio.

The Browning Option

A while back I promised to speak more about different modes of fiction within poetry. I will now begin slowly to redeem that promise, beginning with my own personal favorite method of writing fictional poetry, what I have called the Browning option.

The irony of having named this method after Robert Browning in a blog about sonnets, given that his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was by far the more famous sonnet-writer in the family, is not lost on me. However, even if Robert Browning did not write (or at any rate publish) as many sonnets as his wife - or even many sonnets at all - the method I am about to discuss is highly associated with him, and may certainly be applied to sonnets as well as other forms of poetry. Robert Browning wrote dramatic monologues in verse; he created characters who spoke his poems for him. Browning never had a duchess, much less a "My Last Duchess" painted on a wall; nor did he ever have need to utter a "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister;" nor was he named "Andrea del Sarto." But he wrote all three poems from the perspective of others, named or unnamed, purely fictional or real but with invented words. These monologues are characteristic of Browning - not that he did not write anything else - and to emulate their style is a distinct option when attempting to write sonnets divorced from one's own perspective and feelings. Here I will discourse a little more generally on this style; due to the substantial different in length between a typical Browning dramatic monologue and a sonnet, I will not present any of Browning's poetry in full, but rather by reference. I strongly recommend his work, which is easily accessible (being out of copyright), but it lies a little beyond the scope of this specific blog.

Browning's monologues are, as one would expect from the name, poems that seem ready to be delivered by a speaker - who is not the poet. That means that they are usually in the first person, always with a clearly defined speaker, rather than impersonal or in the omniscient third person. They speak directly to whatever that speaker wishes to say, so you will not see any strains of "To Autumn" or "Ode to a Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning." The priority is on establishing personality - the insanity of "Porphyria's Lover," or the detachment of the duke in "My Last Duchess" - and telling a little slice of that personality's experience of the world. This can be very hard to discern in the fourteen-line space of a sonnet: this is part of why it was difficult to find an example from Browning's work that was clearly a dramatic monologue but also of such short length. This emphatically does not mean that such a poem could not exist, nor indeed that Browning did not write one; rather, it means that length permits much more certainty about the fictional nature of a poem.

One of the crucial ways in which Browning creates his characters is by the use of asides, parentheticals, and self-interruption to simulate speech patterns. Most poems present an uninterrupted whole without these effects, and the introduction of them causes the reader to think about the personality behind them. A similar effect can be created by the strong "I" of the poem that Browning uses; although a monologue need not be self-centered, many of Browning's best are, and the repeated assertion of the ego of the narrator is highly effective. This is the crucial effect; the introduction of the narrator as a character is central to the dramatic monologue, and any useful tool should be employed.

Another aspect of Browning's monologues that would indeed suit them for the sonnet form is the existence of a little change at the end. The revelations in "Porphyria's Lover" and "My Last Duchess" are reserved for late moments of the poems, perfectly suited for the turn of a sonnet. Although there is substantial compression of space in a sonnet, the pattern of establishing a character at the start of the poem and then using that established character in an unexpected way at the end is perfectly suited to the form.

In summary, although the small size of a sonnet can be a hindrance, the dramatic monologue form typified by Robert Browning allows a substantial amount of freedom in the creation of fictional poetry. By establishing a narrative personality and then modulating that personality for effect, the poet can distance himself or herself from the poem itself while still providing a microcosm of a personality for the reader to interact with. If the effect can be navigated within the space of fourteen lines, the final twist characteristic of Browning's dramatic monologues is perfectly suited to the turn at the end of the sonnet form.

On Fictional Poetry

One of the concepts I struggle with the most in writing poetry is the role of fiction in the process. I have touched briefly on this issue in a previous post; I will dilate slightly more fully here. The issue, for me, is one of emotional clarity as well as of sincerity. Because I write poetry to capture moments, thoughts, and feelings, there is a strong pull towards nonfiction, both because I can only truly claim to have any understanding of my own emotions, thoughts, moments (etc) if even those, and because I can hardly expect to be able to successfully convey what I cannot validate in myself. These are closely entwined arguments that. together, I think portray what I mean by emotional clarity: I cannot achieve the true expression of feeling with feelings I have not felt. To this is added sincerity: how honest can the poetry be if I make it all up, not just words but basic thoughts, out of whole cloth?

I will here discuss a few possibilities for dealing with this issue: the intercommunicability problem, the imaginative principle, the Browning option, the aesthetic theory, and the denial of the question. I will only sketch these out; I intend to treat each at further detail in future posts. I hope, however, that they will serve as the beginning of a process of working out this issue.

The intercommunicability problem begins with the assumption that it is impossible to truly know if we can understand each others inner mental states. As such, it is almost pointless to talk about communicating such mental states to each other, and so poetry must, almost axiomatically, find its meaning in some other criteria than making one's mental state (or past mental state) open to an audience. This theory suggests nothing specific as replacement criteria; almost anything may qualify. The central idea is that there is no point to judging a poem on its communication of mental states.

The imaginative principle seems similar on the surface: the fundamental idea here is that imagination affects mental states, and so there is no "real" mental state for the poem to point the reader to. Either the reader and author undergo a similar effect from the poem, and that creates the tie of sincerity between them, whether the author initially felt the state being communicated or not; or they undergo dissimilar changes, but in related ways that allow the poet to predict in some manner how they will differ. In either case, because imagination and mental state are so closely bound up, it is difficult to call "fiction" dishonest, because honesty is not the same as journalistic fact-finding, it is something deeper.

The Browning option, named for the Victorian poet Robert Browning who was known for his dramatic monologues (poems written in the voice of a narrator who is clearly not the poet), suggests that it is the creation of plausible, possible, believable mentalities for the reader to interact with that is the goal of the poem, not the transmission of the single dominant authorial mentality. So long as the poem engages meaningfully in the interaction of the reader and a narrator of some sort with a distinct point of view, real or imagined, it may be judged a success; there need be no relationship between that point of view and the author's.

The aesthetic theory points to the beauty of the poem, usually in relation to its sounds and rhythms, as the primary point of judgment, rather than to anything having to do with the author. As such, the question should not be "how sincere is this poem," but "how beautiful is it." Sincerity may contribute to beauty, or it may not; it is in any case secondary.

The final suggestion I wish to raise is that it is quite possible to deny the validity of this issue; for whatever reason, to suggest that of course poems can be fictional, and there is no reason to ask this question. As I have suggested, my own view of why I write poetry makes this difficult to accept, but it is a very valid way of looking at the world.

These theories are of course neither the be-all nor the end-all of the question (even the last one), and I am always eager to hear about more suggestions. I intend, as I mentioned, to cover each in more depth in the future. At the moment, however, I hope that they can begin to suggest how one can grapple with the joint issues of fiction and sincerity in poetry.

On Sincerity and Inspiration

I wrote the same poem three time today. Or rather, to my annoyance, I did not write the same poem three times today. The initial poem (whether it is the best I cannot say, but it will serve as an ideal for the rest of the process) was lost in the obscure workings of an inexplicably failed upload; the second iteration, composed immediately after in a vain attempt to recover the first, was lost to a sudden crash of a program; the third, a memorial reconstruction of the first two following closely on their heels, appears for now to have succeeded in that it may perhaps pass on beyond its initial composition in the memory of man as assisted by computer.

It almost goes without saying in the context of this blog that these were sonnets. The rhyme scheme (in this case ABBACDDCEFFEGG) was an undoubted aid to memory, as was the meter (iambic pentameter). Yet I could fundamentally feel the sonnet shifting as I attempted to rewrite it from immediate memory. Some of these changes were no doubt improvements that I should rather have preferred to retain in the poem; most were likely neutral; some few may have impaired it. Yet unquestionably and perhaps unreasonably I was annoyed. I wanted that first sonnet, and I wanted to make any changes deliberately and with due consideration, not by the force of a faulty memory. But most of all I wanted my authentic reaction to the stimuli that produced the sonnet, and so I thought its loss might be an excellent reason to discuss, or at least begin discussion of, two topics I have been looking forward to treating here: sincerity and inspiration.

To treat them in the reverse order just mentioned: the inspiration for a sonnet can, of course, come from anywhere. Anything associated with any of the common themes of poetry - or anything not associated with those themes - can serve as an inspiration for a poem. Young love, the flowers that bloom in the spring (tra-la), and death, but also garbage collection, an odd crack in the sidewalk, and a lightbulb can be inspirations for poetry. But that's not particularly useful to hear is it? It's practically a commonplace. What's more interesting, at least to me, is what to do when inspiration does strike, whatever it happens to be triggered by, and the relationship between that inspiration and the final poem-product (or at least the initial poem-product; editing is an issue for another day).

For the former, I am a great proponent of writing right then as the moment strikes. This may be because I used to try to bottle up the feeling and express it later, and failed; you may find a different process better for you. But I believe that attempting at least some initial expression of poetry as soon as the inspiration comes tends to produce a result that is substantially different from doing so in later repose (whether better or worse is almost beside the point; after all, you can recollect at leisure, well, at your leisure, and having written initially should never stop you from doing so). The quicksilver nature of that instant expression is unretrievable, and therefore, even if only therefore, worth preserving. The immediate turn to poetry also strengthens, in my opinion, the poetical instinct: you are more likely to find inspiration the more you react to the inspiration you already find.

The relationship between the poem and its inspiration is complex, and I will only scratch the surface here. For me, a poem is in some way intended to crystallize the feelings that inspired it, to take a moment, real or imagined, and preserve it for others, not to marvel at, but to experience or re-experience in the reading of the poem. Whether that moment and those feelings come from a grand high sense of purpose or a fleeting glance at something interesting on a wall is hardly material to this process, although not every moment is one I would prefer to reproduce. The key is an attempt to make subjective experience communicable, to take a thought, a feeling, or even an action and translate it into a form someone else can take and retranslate back into their own life. That's a high aim, and a hard one to meet - and it is part of why I value both the instant flash of inspiration as it turns into poetry and the later recollection in repose; without both forms it can be very difficult to properly digest and present one's own subjective experience. It is for this reason that I was so unhappy about failing to find the original words, because I was losing the link to my initial subjective experience even as I was trying to recast the poem out of memory, because my focus was turning on the poem rather than on the moment I was attempting to capture itself.

Sincerity is an even more vexed topic than inspiration. To what extent should poetry truly mirror life? To what extent should it be a faithful record of truly felt emotion or truly experienced experience? To what extent is it fiction? To what extent is it the imaginative extension of the poet into feelings he or she may or may not have experienced in life and filters through a process of invention (ie fiction again)? I myself have wavered back and forth on this. Clearly, what I said above about crystallizing experience has a strong tinge of the belief that poetry should be an honest reflection of genuinely felt emotion. But I also believe it is possible to attempt to solidify and translate emotions one only imagines; harder, but possible. Somewhat easier is the presentation of an emotion that has been genuinely held in circumstances different from the one in which it was held; emotion redirected is still emotion, and partakes of the same register of human experience. Thus the strong association between sincerity and my views on the process of translating inspiration into poetry is not airtight; and I definitely believe that there is a place for what I would hesitate to call "insincerity," and should perhaps rather call invention or fiction. There have most certainly been times in my life when reading my poetry would have directly followed my emotional state as surely as that of the most stereotypical angsty teenager ever; but there have equally been times when I wrote completely from imagination, and everywhere in between on the spectrum. What is crucial regarding sincerity for me is that the poem, in the moment it is created, should feel sincere to the poet - the emotions, thoughts, and experiences being communicated may be altered, or invented, or even in the original, but they should be communicated in such a way as to communicate how they are making the poet feel in the moment of creation of the poem. This I find solves the crisis, because even the altered or invented emotions can only be said to have been actually altered or invented if they are affecting the poet in the moment of creation. For example, I may not feel the sadness I am attempting to convey; but thinking of the sadness should be invoking a sympathetic response of sadness within me that I can then place into the poem. If my imagination is not strong enough to conjure up the feelings within my breast that I am attempting to convey, then the poem will fall flat. Thus sincerity comes not in its relation to how the poet might feel at a moment of not writing poetry - hence fiction is not only acceptable but standard - but in its relation to how the poet feels in the moment of writing, a moment in which even invented feelings should be making their impact via the keen edge of imagination. Again, this is why I wished for the first poem that I tried to write, as the experience it was intended to convey was slipping away due to my focus on the recovery of the poem rather than the primary experience itself.

Poetry relies on a focus outside of the poem itself, both for inspiration and for the sincere expression of emotion and experience. In losing the first poem, I lost those points as well, and it became difficult to recreate the poem on its own terms. That is the cause of annoyance - not only the loss of the first poem, but the loss of its connection to the initially sincere expression of inspiration.

The Writing Process

Or at least, my writing process. It seems like an opportune moment to discuss something so individual, so subjective, so idiosyncratic I don't feel comfortable putting it in the Introduction to the Sonnet series. There are, I suppose, general rules about how to write, even how to write sonnets specifically, but it is still by and large something that does and must of necessity flow from the individual poet. If I could tell you exactly how to write a sonnet, what words to use and when, what attitude to have towards composition and at what rate to compose, how and when to throttle the Muse, where would your own poetry come in? But nevertheless I will say something here about how it works, for me at least.

I'll start by mentioning that most of the sonnets seen in this blog, the new original ones anyway, are written, as I am now, on my Android phone. This is not to say that I am plugging for the phone or that something about mobile devices makes a sonnet; after all, most sonnets predate that technology. It is to say that my sonnets are fundamentally akin to text messages. This is not solely applicable to the mode of writing; it would hardly be worth mentioning if it were. Rather, it applies equally to the speed in writing and form of construction of the sonnets.

I write my sonnets fast. I've won bets that I could write a metrically correct, thematically coherent sonnet in less than 1 minute (my friends and I make odd bets). I don't usually write that quickly, but it is very rare that a first full draft of a sonnet takes me more than 5 minutes. Honestly, it is usually more like 2 or 3 minutes.

I start almost always with the first line, part of a line, or line and a half, often the first two lines, occasionally the first three. That's just what usually comes; a packet of pentameter popping into my mind. On the occasions when I get three lines in that initial burst, I know from that what sort of sonnet (Italian or English) I have; otherwise, my first mental order of business is to figure that out so my subconscious can start spitting out rhymes for me. When the poem is really flowing, my subconscious is doing most of that work, tossing up the fragments (usually clumps of 6-10 syllables, with a few longer 12 or 14 enjambments sliding thrmselves in) and letting my conscious mind merely vet those suggestions. I know that is the division of labor because when I dislike my first thought a similar size of verse almost always pops up in its place without my having to puzzle over it. These chunks are, as I've said, of fairly standard size, usually just about one line long, give or take a foot or two.

The trick comes when that subconscious flow stops, pauses, or is muddied. This almost always happens at the turn between octave and sestet (in an Italian sonnet) or the end of the last quatrain (in an English sonnet). Often it happens at both lines 8-9 and 12-13, regardless of the type of sonnet actually being written; those seem to be the key points within a 14 line scheme. Sometimes the 14th is the hardest line of all - in fact, this is often true - but that is primarily as a result of a pause that happened at the 12th or 13th line. In these cases, regardless of when they happen, I have to bring my conscious brain to the problem. For this I first try to simply use my own sense of where the poem should go (something that, along with the rhyme scheme, I try to figure out as early as possible, but unlike the rhymes I tend to remain flexible about all the way to the end) and my own vocabulary; when the latter in particular fails, or the words are simply not coming, I tend to use an online rhyming dictionary (rhymezone.com is a favorite).

The greatest difficulty in these moments comes when the line wants to be too long, either because the rhyme word(s) that seem natural are too long or because too much information has to be smashed into too little space. In these cases my first instinct is generally to revise earlier lines, either incorporating that information into them or using them as a vehicle to move syllables upwards. This often results in changing the rhyme words (easiest in the sestet of an Italian sonnet or the couplet of an English one, slightly harder but not too hard in the quatrains of an English sonnet, and fiendish at times in the octave of an Italian). If this fails, which it rarely does, I change the rhyme scheme or change the (treatment of the) theme; or in rare and worse cases, simply make do with a poorer word than I would like. But that is the order of preference I have: change the earlier lines, change the structure, hack the line.

This process usually carries me through the sonnet rather rapidly, as I have mentioned. All these sub-processes are almost simultaneous, except when it gets really bad. Which leaves really only the question of theme, and how themes or topics arise in my sonnets.

I have mentioned that I tend to have a line pop into my head and build the sonnet off of that line; this in turn brings me to the other way my sonnets are like text messages, in that they tend to come off the top of my head rather than after deep analysis and thought. Sometimes this can have negative externalities associated with it, such as when too much of my momentary thinking, feeling, or other associations gets sucked into the sonnet and it ends up either boring everyone else or revealing disturbingly large amounts about where my head was when I wrote it. But generally it is a positive, as the flow of the sonnet is much improved when I am not fighting against my current state of mind to produce it. Wordsworth said in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that poetry was "emotion recollected in tranquility"; this is somewhat true for me, but it is more the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" he also references there, and it is neither wholly. Rather, it is the spontaneous overflow of thought itself, rather than feeling. Certainly feelings come into the picture, but my poetry arises out of my conscious mind, even when it is written by my subconscious. I do not tend to write poems after the fact, or when I do they are tinged by the wistfulness of the recollecting present. I will begin to write a poem about the rainstorm falling on my head not in the dry recesses of the welcome house where I find relief and shelter, but in the midst of the defiant tempest.

This I believe should serve as a rather lengthy introduction to my writing process; there is of course more, but I must leave something for future reference and save both my fingers and your eyes more text. I will leave you with a simple thought: I began writing poems with the goal of writing one a day to my sweetheart. I have not maintained that pace, nor (alas for youth) the sweetheart, but I have written somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand sonnets; and I see no end in sight.