I am evidently very bad at keeping to my planned writing schedule. It is almost May and I have produced approximately zero short stories ._.
I have been writing more poetry in the last few months though, although none of it is I think particularly good. Most of the stuff I have written is not even in a shareable state yet. Ironically I have been finding that the more 'serious' writing I have been trying to do, the more I have been trying to cut down unnecessary words, and also I realized that my attention span is not long enough to create any kind of 'plot' or 'conflict' or 'character development' -- I am mostly just interested in fun sentences and thoughts and fleeting ideas and emotions, and this is how my attempt to write a short story devolved (evolved?) into an attempt to write a poem.
But then once one starts to write a poem, one finds that there are other things that seemingly start to matter, like ensuring that every word is the correct word, or trying to see if there is anything particularly clever that can be done to hint at a different reading, or allude to some symbolic metaphor, which ultimately takes us down into some completely-unrelated-to-what-we-were-originally-communicating rabbit hole.
I have this bad habit where I start analyzing the poem I am writing as if I were reading it. This is bad because I then get too excited about the possible ways of reading the poem, and get lost in the sauce of where I want to go in terms of writing it. Then I get a bit sad because I am pretty sure nobody except me would end up getting what I 'read' out of my own poem, but also realize that it probably didn't matter anyway because I'm basically just circle-jerking ideas in my own head that have no real world impact.
And then (unlike when writing a blog post or other long prose), when there are so few words on the screen, I find myself reading and re-reading and editing as I go, because some phrase doesn't quite feel right rhythmically, or some word doesn't quite fit in aurally, in terms of the 'sound' of the word, in its assonant or rhyming qualities. But then once one thing changes, the rest of the structure is also subject to that change, so it becomes a challenge to 'fold everything in on its neighbor' (like when you try to fold in all the edges of a box lid such that each side is stacked on top of the side next to it, such as in an Escher staircase). Somehow cardboard feels more flexible than lines in poems.
I also have never been particularly interested in writing rhyming poems. I think it has always just read very whimsical / delightful to me and a little too 'perfect' in its structure. Now that I write down my thoughts about this, I think it is similar in spirit to my feelings toward Mozart. I'm not a classical music expert, but my uninformed opinion is that Mozart pieces tend to sound very structured and formulaic, and not as interesting as other composers. I have no idea if this is actually true from from a music theory point of view, this is only my impression from listening to his composition.
So this leaves me with:
1. a desire to write poem(s)
2. that use language elements to be interesting and convey layers of meaning
3. where the layers of meaning complement but do not overshadow the main theme of the poem
4. and where the elements used to make the poem more technically interesting are not too formulaic or structured
I'm also a bit of an imposter because I don't actually read a lot of poetry, and that should probably change if I were to start (attempting) writing poetry, so please let me know if there are any particular poems or poets you enjoy that I should read. I recently bought a copy of Ariel (Sylvia Plath) and am enjoying it.
Another fun exercise I thought about that my language skills are not good enough to do would be to write poetry in Chinese, where the meaning or radical breakdowns of the written characters would also add a layer of meaning to the poem. I had this idea to write a poem where if you read it to a listener, it would mean one thing (the most obvious phonetic reading), but then when you read the actual characters, it means something completely different (probably some structural line breaks or weird words would be used for their meaning only). Bonus points for if the two meanings are related to some common theme. Unfortunately my Chinese is not good enough to do something like this but I think it would be a cool poem :)
Ok uh anyway I think that's it for now, a short update on why you haven't read anything I have written in the last four months. Will anything get shared anytime soon? Stay tuned! Who knows! I didn't set out to make this blog post today but I was just so happy to finally be faced with a low-plan weekend at home that I decided to take some time to spill some thoughts onto the internet. Does this whole post even make any sense? I don't know! I'm not about to read this many words and edit it though, it's no poem, yolo and publish leggu
