Squaretable Seminars

I’ve never thought of writing a poem first in prose and then breaking it up into lines. I like to use the lines while I’m creating my thoughts on the page. Sometimes I rearrange and change the lines, but they’re always there. I like the idea of the words as bricks to work with – it makes the ideas more tactile.

It makes sense that the rhythm of the words helps create the mood of the poem, but thinking of it in comparison to the way music is written is something new. A great musician knows so much more about the piece of music even before they start playing the notes. They have background information about the style of the piece, when it was written, who composed it, etc. And once they delve into the written notation they get more clues from the author about style and dynamic and mood.

That’s hard to compete with when writing with words. You can never know how a reader will choose to read the poem. It’s a lot of work to make my thoughts try to read clearly.