Tag Archives: poetry

Tinderbox and Poetry

tinder1.jpgTinderbox is proving most helpful for organizing my ideas in “futures.” Note that this is a tentative title. The title will come from further link mining, where the writer, through rewriting and rereading, finds more and deeper relations in the text.

Thus far the poem is developing from 1) inferred links and 2) natural narrative logic. Inferred link development is pretty simple. As the poet scans a stanza or line, a word may suggest a connection or another body of lines or stanzas. This is a potential pitfall in that once the poem develops the link may not make sense anymore or may emerge in some other section of the origin space. Natural narrative logic is what a poet senses or feels “should follow” either into another text space or as a continuation of language. It’s kin to syntax or diction. Is it a red dog that caught the ball you see bouncing down the sidewalk or

A blue ball bounces
followed by Mandy
the neighbor’s angry setter
downhill fast
toward traffic . . .

Of course, I’m just naming two thought processes here. Whatever the convention, I’m using Tinderbox adornments to collect pieces of the poem into clusters for visual sorting. It will be interesting to visualize how these adornment clusters may change after common word searching.

It’s now time to start eliminating text by shedding flimsy images and hindersome nothings.

Poetry and Hypertext

Where the coyotes
follow her to the river
and then lose scent
to the days beyond

I’m working through some problems in the current draft of a poem in hypertext.  Of course, one problem is simply finding the time to write during the teaching semester, but time will come over the break for digging into the project.

The topology of one section of the work is an interesting quest to sort out relationships of color, distance, and texture across time and space.  The above stanza is a section of the poem that “crosses to” a great distance, a distance that wants to come to me as an image from my own experience with the desert.

North of Las Cruses, in southern New Mexico, I used to drive through a section of highway that cut through the mountains, to a spot where you could climb up and sit and watch the town’s and city lights appear.  The sky would rise and distances were suggested by blackness behind the lights, the stars, and the bulk of mountains and radio towers across the Rio Grande river in Mexico.   That distance relates to time and memory.  The link, hopefully, will sharpen the potential connections between imagined occurrences and the specific details that make them whole in relation to one another.

Such as the thought of coyotes hunting then losing the scent. But it’s not coyotes.  It’s a darkness in the distance.  It’s something lost and reimagined, found yet still, or potentially,  unfamiliar.

I can still feel the touch of that stone, the warmth of the night, the sweet smell of the near desert misted by the glare of the distant city lights.