30/1 - Observations
I'm usually too busy for 30/30, not motivated enough or have enough poetry hot action in my life that doing it daily for a month doesn't get my engine going.
Aw, who am I kidding: I like working in a "hurt locker"; I get so I can't do it the normal way anymore. I need the challenges. I'm addicted to the pressure. I’m the Evel Knievel of Poetry!
Anyhow, my mommy issues aside, here is some replay action. The entry's link for play-a-long reference:
http://scottwoods.livejournal.com/354671.html
I didn't plan this at all. I was just struck with the idea because I couldn't sleep Saturday night and the internet was playing dead. I was looking over various 30/30 offerings and then it occurred to me that it might be cool to see if I could finish 30 poems in the remaining five days of the month. Then I thought it would be even cooler to try to do 30 right then, writing until I couldn’t stay awake anymore. Then I settled on 30/1, but utilizing forms as a guide and set of tools. From there I put in bad movie after bad and proceeded to start cranking until I couldn't keep my eyes open, which was about 4 AM. The next day I hit the laptop (which I hate writing on but was closest to the TV, which I needed) around 1:00 PM and then cranked them out until 6:05 PM, which is why I was a little behind getting to Page Meets Stage. All in all it took me about 9 hours, not 24.
I wrote them pretty much in the order you see until about poem #20 or so. I'd written in most of these forms in the past, but a few were first-timers for me. Some I hadn't done in years. One I'd never heard of, but researched while working on something else. Some of them I had to dust off, but when you've got a deadline on you that tends to get the blood going. Forms are tools, and I approach them like tools: used to build something. Some of them are cool, some not so much. At the end of the day (literally, I suppose) I have thirty pieces of new information I didn't have before. I can make new poems with them, expand them, edit them, perform them...whatever. But I have thirty ideas I didn't have on Friday and that I wouldn’t have had today. Saturday’s ideas.
If I set out to do 30 typical Scott poems I wouldn't have been able to complete this. My natural voice and tendency is a longer, performance-based form, around 4 minutes. Well, if I spent 24 hours doing it, maybe. But not in the nine hours I actually used.
#2 - I could have kept at that one all day. Normally I would have never sat down to write some blues without music playing, but I wasn’t in my office during any of this, so I did it acapella.
#4 - Calligrams are hard for me, and I’d like another whack at this one without the existing form.
#8 - Quentin was a kid I was in first or second grade with. He was killed by a car. It was my first funeral. My mother took me. I didn’t know what to say to his mother so my mom spoke for me. I remember not seeing anyone else from our class there.
#10 - Taken from Harlan Ellison, whose prose is practically poetry in its original state. I could do twenty good books of awesome found poems just out of Ellison writings.
#11 - Guess what I was watching then.
#12 - You have to tug at your pants when you read this one.
#13 - I wrote this one kind of early in the process. It’s snarkier than I actually feel.
#18 - There really are four other horror movie girl poems.
#19 - That one’s for Tony Brown.
#20 - I’m not a fan of skeltonics, even good ones, but they can be a worthy challenge.
#23 - Possibly my favorite out of the lot.
#24 - The Klingon is real.
#25 - Didn’t set out to write about abortion…the words just came that way. Once I found out what the poem was trying to be, I changed some of the words to tell a far more sinister story than what was happening.
#28 - You know I love me some Judas.
#30 - I love this painting, I like this poem.
Aw, who am I kidding: I like working in a "hurt locker"; I get so I can't do it the normal way anymore. I need the challenges. I'm addicted to the pressure. I’m the Evel Knievel of Poetry!
Anyhow, my mommy issues aside, here is some replay action. The entry's link for play-a-long reference:
http://scottwoods.livejournal.com/354671.html
I didn't plan this at all. I was just struck with the idea because I couldn't sleep Saturday night and the internet was playing dead. I was looking over various 30/30 offerings and then it occurred to me that it might be cool to see if I could finish 30 poems in the remaining five days of the month. Then I thought it would be even cooler to try to do 30 right then, writing until I couldn’t stay awake anymore. Then I settled on 30/1, but utilizing forms as a guide and set of tools. From there I put in bad movie after bad and proceeded to start cranking until I couldn't keep my eyes open, which was about 4 AM. The next day I hit the laptop (which I hate writing on but was closest to the TV, which I needed) around 1:00 PM and then cranked them out until 6:05 PM, which is why I was a little behind getting to Page Meets Stage. All in all it took me about 9 hours, not 24.
I wrote them pretty much in the order you see until about poem #20 or so. I'd written in most of these forms in the past, but a few were first-timers for me. Some I hadn't done in years. One I'd never heard of, but researched while working on something else. Some of them I had to dust off, but when you've got a deadline on you that tends to get the blood going. Forms are tools, and I approach them like tools: used to build something. Some of them are cool, some not so much. At the end of the day (literally, I suppose) I have thirty pieces of new information I didn't have before. I can make new poems with them, expand them, edit them, perform them...whatever. But I have thirty ideas I didn't have on Friday and that I wouldn’t have had today. Saturday’s ideas.
If I set out to do 30 typical Scott poems I wouldn't have been able to complete this. My natural voice and tendency is a longer, performance-based form, around 4 minutes. Well, if I spent 24 hours doing it, maybe. But not in the nine hours I actually used.
#2 - I could have kept at that one all day. Normally I would have never sat down to write some blues without music playing, but I wasn’t in my office during any of this, so I did it acapella.
#4 - Calligrams are hard for me, and I’d like another whack at this one without the existing form.
#8 - Quentin was a kid I was in first or second grade with. He was killed by a car. It was my first funeral. My mother took me. I didn’t know what to say to his mother so my mom spoke for me. I remember not seeing anyone else from our class there.
#10 - Taken from Harlan Ellison, whose prose is practically poetry in its original state. I could do twenty good books of awesome found poems just out of Ellison writings.
#11 - Guess what I was watching then.
#12 - You have to tug at your pants when you read this one.
#13 - I wrote this one kind of early in the process. It’s snarkier than I actually feel.
#18 - There really are four other horror movie girl poems.
#19 - That one’s for Tony Brown.
#20 - I’m not a fan of skeltonics, even good ones, but they can be a worthy challenge.
#23 - Possibly my favorite out of the lot.
#24 - The Klingon is real.
#25 - Didn’t set out to write about abortion…the words just came that way. Once I found out what the poem was trying to be, I changed some of the words to tell a far more sinister story than what was happening.
#28 - You know I love me some Judas.
#30 - I love this painting, I like this poem.