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uutpoetry:

How to Write a Poem

Don’t think too much, don’t express your feelings,
and don’t try to make sense.
Above all, write quickly, asap after
the image is conceived. If you let it go cold
you’ll overthink it and it’ll lose its magic.
For instance I saw a tiny egg shell
on my lawn this morning fallen from a branch.
Then I saw something colorful—fruit I think—
and then I saw some carrot pulp, neon orange
in a bucket by the sink. This excited my senses
and I thought, “there is a poem here somewhere,”
but something had gone wrong and I had to
restart my laptop and during the reboot
the magic disappeared and I was like
“those images are stupid, that’s not a poem”—
overthinking about how somebody someday
might take such a poem seriously and read into
the image of the egg shell and the pulp
and how I might be called on to give an account
of what it means and how it is out there
in the universe, which is stupid of course
because nobody cares that much and even if they did
they wouldn’t actually think it meant anything,
and if they do I can just act annoyed like
they don’t get it and what do they know.

Anyway, write your ideas fast, and don’t worry
about logic: logic is the enemy of a poem!
Discursiveness is allowed because that’s what a
poem should imitate—the mind wandering through
its own universe, making sense of things, wanting
to understand, to know, to satisfy the desires
of the flesh and spirit—which is not the same thing
as logic or reasoning.

This whole process takes less than 10 minutes.
When you’re done go back—quickly!—and revise,
but only phrases you don’t like and obviously
boring cliches. Don’t edit ideas, just the language.
You want your poem to be a beautiful sexy text
after all. Unless you’re writing a haiku or other
short form, you want the poem to feel fast; there
should be a breathless forward movement of thought
so that the reader is carried along and discouraged
from (over)thinking. This makes the reader feel
like you felt when you wrote the poem, which feels good
because you feel connected to another human being.
If there are any parts that make you slow down
because of syntax or hypotaxis or general profundities
cut it or simplify it. Don’t confuse this with
“wandering”: wandering is allowed and even
encouraged; it’s the brainsurge of coalescing
all thoughts into a grandiose whole
that you want to avoid, because it feels like work
and it confuses people into thinking the poem has
a point. Poems don’t have points they aren’t about
making points they are things that exist in the world
just like you and me, and we have to respect that
and let the poem be its own thing and acknowledge it
respectfully and maybe give it rights.

The strange thing about this poem is that it has
almost no images except the ones that I got
self-conscious about, which started this whole thing.
Strange, too, because this poem is not really “my style.”

Ok so go write poems have fun and don’t think!

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(Source: rubyredwisp)

74,883 notes | 3 days ago

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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

A’capella cover, huh… we’ll see about th… …

(via tellherwittystories)

52,808 notes | 4 days ago

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stimulatingthoughts:

Through The Clouds (By esther**)

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xntrek:

Yes, a million times yes.

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