actually bill, i think i'd have to disagree with you about poetry being abstraction. it's only that if you make it abstraction. i think most good poems are something concrete. yeah, maybe the idea behind it is an abstraction, but so isn't the theme in any piece of prose. no, i'd venture to say that good poetry is anything but abstraction.
i'm also not sure what you mean by calling it limited. since it followed rewrites and edits, cuts and pastings, bring middles forward, etc. i'm not sure if one leads to the next or what you're saying here. but i can tell that fiction falls under the same rules of rewrite. i'm a prose writer also, so i know. i've had many times i've had to delete sections, move things around in prose. i've got two, that i have to totally rewrite because the pov doesn't work as well as it should, and there is a better way to work it. no, a writer of either poetry or prose has to not be afraid of revision. your first idea may be the best, but the first draft rarely is. be honest with us, of those 4,000 words a day you write, how many do you keep?
speaking of abstraction, what is this supposed to mean, "Poetry soars but is fixed like crystal" and "Poetry is abstraction: A representation of reality so less mutable than prose which merely describes it." ? the problem with statements like that is that they are what many people think poetry is. pretty words. hard to understand phrases. which isn't at all what good poetry is.
or maybe i just misread what you were saying.
jason
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