Organization principles are put to excellent use in Tinderbox. But it takes thinking ahead. For a container for 2009 poetry writing, I first created two empty notes and made each of them a prototype, with a few unique properties. I titled them “Formed” and “Free Form.” Then I wrote a Ninja poem inside a new note, assigning that note to the “Free Form” prototype. Then I started another poem, a sonnet, and assigned that to the “Formed” prototype.

Now that this is set up, I can generate work and keep the two kinds of poem organized according to these two formal genre.

They’re crazy. I’ve landed on That Night I Saw on My Homeward Way. For kicks and for congruence.

The first part goes like this:

A June night
the moon full
with cooling milk
and gypsum grain
I saw a shape leap
from the stones and drop
into the black
hush of the sea

with links at “night” “cooling” and “the sea.”

I have to keep reminding myself that writing poetry is not about repeating what I’m thinking, but about finding strings of words that I would never have thought if I hadn’t assigned the time to sitting down and kicking myself in the ass that’s between my ears.

I remember a long time ago. I was stopped at a light in downtown El Paso and poof, an idea came, and I knew then that this was the game. I was writing a novel about a guy named Tell Monk, who’d returned to his mountain town to repursue a relationship after being gone. He had to break into his house, since he’d lost his key, and was met in a room by a gun-weilding sheriff who’d come to investigate, and thus the story proceeded into all kinds of cliche, which I need to go back to sometime and “re-pursue.” At the time, little sparks would come and the thinking was fun.

But now it’s poetry that’s coming and so it’s time to pursue poetry. But what does extending the writing look or feel like? How does the writer know that something’s new and not a thought that’s become repetitious or tiring? I don’t know, but it’s worth thinking about. We can’t just invent interesting thinking or relations by wishing they’d come, but we can write something and then test a metaphor or image, subtract a word or implant a word that springs from the crazy relation.

Bones. Ninjas. Yup, there are rocks on the high sides of mountains. Yesterday, I thought about a poem in which a ninja balances on a guitar string. Now that’s something I’ve never seen and this spark reminded me that in many poems that are linked I’d been careering through redundancy, that I’d been searching through the same waste basket finding the same old trash. That’s what’s there, the cups and bread crusts of the lunch before. Sometimes, however, the bite in that old sandwich looks like a urinal or the memory of a shadow on the red church carpet at 10 in the morning on a cloudy day, when no one’s about and the candles in their red cups have been lit. Hail to the tossed sandwich crusts. Hail to the votives of the candle-lighter who knows not that his lamps tremble on the floor like the anxiety sharpening the edge of a shout blown through a widow’s mouth on some winter day with hungry children sleeping through their dreams.

Regarding this post on poetry, there are still further questions. Every block of poetry must have a center or be centered as if it were a unique or single poem.

In addition, a new concept developed last night. It has to do with time, simultaneity, and four dimensional views, meaning 3D plus time. This isn’t hard to figure out. The concept goes like this: A medieval cathedral is a four dimensional object. Typically, they took more than one generation to build and they have material and spatial scope. The other metaphor is a painting that takes generations to complete, thus each layer has a different surface of compression.

This approach is freeing. Rather than a narrative line intertwingling the bits and pieces, relations work through the compressions.

It’s fun again.

The more a writer uses Tinderbox, the more the writer learns from revision and rethinking. This is not a hypothesis. With a few writing spaces open and explicit links open to scrutiny, the thought process changes.

And so I’ve changed a lot over the last few days. In my most recent poem, called describing the moon now, the focus has changed from narrative poem to something more kin to a nature walk, observational, referential, and wide angle. Originally, I wanted to trace how a note written a long time ago would make its way back to the end. But after some intensive revision, the necessity of this diminished. In some areas of the poem the note matters. In others, the language moves to objects and landscapes, people, and events in the life of the speaker.

I wanted a note to follow is an intention. But the energy is not following. In the poem, I have an image of the speaker considering images of old men cupping small flames in their hands. Going after this sort of surprise has become much more fun than trying to keep to defined narrative.

Susan Gibb asks two questions in reference to the Moon post.

1) Are you writing it into Tinderbox rather than Storyspace? 2) Does the necessary manipulation of the hypertext process hinder or help with metaphor?

1. I’m writing it in Tinderbox. I’m not using guard fields in the writing, though this would be interesting. But as the poem will be published on the web, I want a simple export into html and then will do just a little bit of javascripting for some of the required effects.

2. If I’m understanding the second question, I’d claim that metaphor as intrinsic to the work will develop in different ways due to links. Links can be they’re own layer of metaphor. If light is a link, then light may have some sort of binding quality. But it is like chess, as you must be able to see several steps ahead into the work and keep the paths in mind, hence the use of adornments.

I have an adornment called Strawberry Eyes. This title references a line in a cluster of stanzas that captures the flavor of that cluster and distinguishes it from four others. Sometimes the clusters link, sometimes not to other clusters. Each of these clusters sheds a different light on the context of the poem, but this is, at the moment, only a visual apparatus, a means of keeping track of poetic narrative.

Sense should develop in each cluster as any poem might, specific detail gravitating toward the nut or idea at the heart or joint of something.

Oddly enough, there may be some morphological rhythm to work with. Like forests or something lost. In terms of something lost, you may remember a toy or an opportunity that still nags at you. You may remember a moment in the woods where everything worked. To regrasp all this, you might go for consonant gain or grays, blacks, shadow snags, lampless unsteadiness. Like trips down darkened stairs.