[John Riley]

I'm writing a poem a day right now. Yes, I am in a vein and many of them are similar in pace and structure, but when I can write myself into the zone I like much of what appears. I write poetry for what it does to me. Chances are I'm never going into the Norton Anthology or whatever so I write to touch something. One advantage I may have is that I made my living writing nonfiction for years. In some ways that hampered me when I returned to poetry, but one of the gifts it provided me is I can write and write and write, although I have slowed down a bit because of age and such things. So I don't mind writing the poem a day because I may write a couple of thousand words or so before I touch something that sparks me, then I'm in the place I need to be. I do it because it's fun and I know that at some point I'll go to a place that won't allow me to do it and be miserable until I am allowed to leave.

Also, who in the hell wants to write without seeing the words? That's like having sex with the most beautiful partner you can imagine in the pitch dark. I love the words before me.

[Yves S L]

So the house style is not to explicitly refer to other people's comments. Rightio.

I interpret composing with eyes closed as an exercise in what is commonly called "working memory" and it is useful insofar as an increase in mental bandwith can easily be applied to eyes open composition. Be able to manipulate large amounts of information mentally is known as usefl in fields as different as chess and muscial composition, so no reason why it would not have an application to poetry. Nevertheless, for me a preliminary exercise would be expanding working memory in relation to sensory perception, so being able to hold the sensory details of something as simple as sitting in the garden.

The talk of inspiration reminds me of what I heard a music teacher say recently: Mozart wrote his masterpieces because he was getting paid. Talk about seperating those that are amateur from those that are not, to me, has a basis in the history of artists having to feed their children. More generally, I interpret talk of inspiration as depending on subconscious processes not made explicit. There was a phase when I could write ten poems a day.