My Process

My process.

First thing I do, is I wake up. I drink a cup of coffee or two. I put on Bob Ross and watch him paint a picture. Then, I get up off the couch, and go on quora and write about a dozen answers. I watch a few videos on YouTube (always educational). And then I take a walk. Sometimes at the State Park, sometimes through my neighborhood, sometimes instead of a walk, I drive. I get a Coca-Cola, or I quaff a couple of cups of Green Tea.

During this whole time period, I do intense amounts of thinking. Delusions? They become fodder for my poetry. Delusions which turned out to be true? Also fodder for my poetry. Lol. I just imagine things, and let my mind wander through the entire corpus of what I’m trying to figure out. A lot of intense thinking.

Normally, there’s a subject for the day. I do the same thing I did as a youth, when I ran around in the basement, and played war with a stick. Only now, I take walks and drives, and think. Really think. Like, I’m talking intense thinking. Everything I do think about, turns into fodder for a poem.

And at that point, after writing dozens of Quora Answers, after arguing with people in comments sections, after watching a few educational videos—every now and then I read a chapter or two of a book, or I read an essay or a poem suggested to me through coincidence—I get an intense thought. And that intense thought is what all the previous wandering and working was done.

Now, granted, I might write about 10,000 words a day. So, remember that. So, when I finally do set down to write my poem, all that subconscious energy gets focused into one point. One solitary point. And that focus becomes a poem. Could be a good poem. Could be a bad poem. Could be a villainous masterpiece, it could be a saintly excursion. Maybe a Character comes to mind, a metaphor, a moral, a synthesis. Sometimes material is working through me for years before I set down and write it.

But, when I do, the poem usually gets written pretty quick. It just comes from the tip of my thoughts. It comes from spontaneous exertion. It just writes itself, it seems. That after lots of practice. And, once that is done, I put the poem into a selection, which then gets boiled into another selection for my books. As composing the poems into comprehensible larger works is part of the joy. Arranging my poetry is half the fun of writing it. I love arranging poems, and fitting themes together.

But then, there is this moment while writing it, where the idea comes. It just comes. It’s this strong, lucid idea, and it just spontaneously arrives, usually after a lot of walking. As I walk, I compose the themes—because I’m very imaginative when I walk… My body has to be moving for it to do its deepest thinking—and I start to compose verses, which usually don’t get remembered fully, except in a subconscious block. I’ll compose poems while I walk, sort of like Wordsworth used to do. I go over the themes, and I compose it mentally, building a framework—-or sometimes if it’s a longer piece, I’ll write a plot map, and usually follow it loosely—and then, suddenly, I begin to write. And then the finished poem arrives. And I edit it, and I read it, and I wait while writing it, until it gives me that moment of perfect peace. When the poem feels peace, I finish. Sometimes I choose a poetic form—like just recently I did a blitz, which was probably the hardest poetic form I ever wrote in, coincidently, due to the lack of grammar it was hard to keep focus on using no punctuation while also keeping the strict poetic form, which I broke in true fashion as that type of form is meant to be broken; it’s in the spirit of the poets who made it—and I move onto the next piece. After about a hundred or so poems are finished, I compose them into books of poetry, arranging them by their quality. I don’t say any of my poems are poor quality, but put them next to some of my other poems, it doesn’t flow right, so it has to go with poems that are like other poems. Arranging them is fun, actually. I get a lot of joy out of arranging the pieces as much as writing them, because I can flesh out stories better and mould themes more concretely, whereas when the poem first comes out, it sort of fits randomly. But, I have the poems in their original compositions and order on my blog.

But, that’s how.