Revisiting the Lab: Some of My Poetry Experiments
Last night I released a chapbook of poems digitally online, entitled Last One Given. It is notable less for its free price tag and more for the time in which it took me to write the work therein: two days. (The book lists it as three days but that's a technicality of time more than effort.)
This isn't the first time I've done it. In fact, I seem to be slowing down.
In 2010 I did a 30/1 exercise, composing thirty poems in one day for National Poetry Month (and because I wanted to see if I could). I took the experiment a step further and used a different poetry form for each poem. You can see that effort here: http://scottwoods.livejournal.com/354671.html
I played with other long poems (boy, DID I) and deadline exercises after that but the most notable one until yesterday was 2012's chapbook entitled Autumn, which was my first digital-only collection and was written in one day as well.It took me longer to write fewer poems than it did in the same amount of time, even though the form restrictions were far fewer. You can see Autumn here.
Which brings us to yesterday's release, which was written in two days, had zero form restrictions (though I did write a couple of forms into it, I did not REQUIRE myself to do so at the onset), and yielded the same number of poems.
I love these experiments. They generate a lot of poems at once, good or bad, and any real poet will tell you that you need both to be successful. I'm a marathon runner: I started sprinting, ran out of breath, learned how to run. Now just keep heading toward the next finish line. You tack seven 24-hour readings on top of that pile and that's some heavy poetry lifting.
And I can't wait to see what happens next.
This isn't the first time I've done it. In fact, I seem to be slowing down.
In 2010 I did a 30/1 exercise, composing thirty poems in one day for National Poetry Month (and because I wanted to see if I could). I took the experiment a step further and used a different poetry form for each poem. You can see that effort here: http://scottwoods.livejournal.com/354671.html
I played with other long poems (boy, DID I) and deadline exercises after that but the most notable one until yesterday was 2012's chapbook entitled Autumn, which was my first digital-only collection and was written in one day as well.It took me longer to write fewer poems than it did in the same amount of time, even though the form restrictions were far fewer. You can see Autumn here.
Which brings us to yesterday's release, which was written in two days, had zero form restrictions (though I did write a couple of forms into it, I did not REQUIRE myself to do so at the onset), and yielded the same number of poems.
I love these experiments. They generate a lot of poems at once, good or bad, and any real poet will tell you that you need both to be successful. I'm a marathon runner: I started sprinting, ran out of breath, learned how to run. Now just keep heading toward the next finish line. You tack seven 24-hour readings on top of that pile and that's some heavy poetry lifting.
And I can't wait to see what happens next.