Tag Archives: Tinderbox

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.