poem under construction
Feb. 24th, 2021 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueConstruction of the Death Opus poem proceeds apace and is presently about 75 lines long, of which 3/4 are pretty solid, but there is a section which is still very sketchy, the section I think of as "Autopsy (body as physical)" although I don't intend to use subheadings in the final version.
Mainly this part is going slowly because I keep getting distracted by similarities between medical terminology and medieval English misunderstandings of ancient Latin texts. Who knows how much of that's going to make it into the finished poem; I certainly don't. There is currently a cockatrice.
I think as a whole the style of my long poems is "shelf in a part of the room that's not lit, holding a jumble of obscured shadowy objects which look rare and expensive, but not well cared for, and also probably at least one of them is going to upset you if you put your face close to it, plus dust."
My short poems in contrast are usually bright and angular, I think. There are probably lots counterexamples of both types that I'm not thinking of.
The process so far (this is not my usual process):
- write pages and pages of notes longhand in a notebook
- type them into a word doc
- group by theme
- cut all of the lines in one of the 5 themes because they are a different poem
- print it out
- mark up one of the four sections a lot with pen, adding lines, putting arrows by lines, that need to move, crossing out extraneous parts of lines and extraneous lines
- fix in word doc, print out again
- mark it up again, do this bit on a loop until that section is good
- move to next section
Once I've finished this process with the last section, the section I'm working on, probably I will move to a new stage of cutting up the print out and moving stanzas around, because although I'm very sure what the last three stanzas are I am less sure about the order of the other ones. Currently lots of arrows going back and forth with question marks next to them.
Mainly this part is going slowly because I keep getting distracted by similarities between medical terminology and medieval English misunderstandings of ancient Latin texts. Who knows how much of that's going to make it into the finished poem; I certainly don't. There is currently a cockatrice.
I think as a whole the style of my long poems is "shelf in a part of the room that's not lit, holding a jumble of obscured shadowy objects which look rare and expensive, but not well cared for, and also probably at least one of them is going to upset you if you put your face close to it, plus dust."
My short poems in contrast are usually bright and angular, I think. There are probably lots counterexamples of both types that I'm not thinking of.
The process so far (this is not my usual process):
- write pages and pages of notes longhand in a notebook
- type them into a word doc
- group by theme
- cut all of the lines in one of the 5 themes because they are a different poem
- print it out
- mark up one of the four sections a lot with pen, adding lines, putting arrows by lines, that need to move, crossing out extraneous parts of lines and extraneous lines
- fix in word doc, print out again
- mark it up again, do this bit on a loop until that section is good
- move to next section
Once I've finished this process with the last section, the section I'm working on, probably I will move to a new stage of cutting up the print out and moving stanzas around, because although I'm very sure what the last three stanzas are I am less sure about the order of the other ones. Currently lots of arrows going back and forth with question marks next to them.
