WOW! Well so far I read Morning and Afternoon. will save evening for tomorrow. Brilliant! So complicated yet put so beautifully and I can so fully understand and relate. BRAVO!
Thank you for your kind words! I'm glad you're enjoying it.
Gravity, is, well, gravity. I think that the line "violence is the force that pushes us on" came to me first, but I'm not sure I remember how I got from there to the idea that other forces were involved too. On some level, I think it just seemed obvious enough to me that a river flows downstream because of gravity that I felt it needed to go in there. To the degree that gravity becomes metaphorical or symbolic in the poem, I suppose it's symbolic of scientific law or natural law in general, but I think that mostly gravity is just gravity. The part about gravity, desire and violence was really something I came up with for the first part that ended up being increasingly important as I continued to develop my ideas for the poem rather than something that was a key part of the imagery as it first came to me, so it ended up playing a large role, but the fact that gravity and desire ended up playing such a large role in particular was to some degree unintended at first?
I came up with the image that prompted the poem while considering a social problem in a social context, so it became important to me to write a poem that wasn't only about a single person's journey, as that wasn't really relevant to what I had been thinking about. I think some of my first few aborted tries may have been about only one person, and that might have been one of the reasons why I didn't find them satisfying? At any rate, it was quite clear to me from the beginning that it had to be more than one person making the journey. I kind of wanted to keep it ambiguous over the course of the poem as to whether it was only two or more than two, but I'm not sure if I succeeded in the end. In the end, it turned out that, since I was pondering my own thoughts about an issue when I came up with the image behind the poem, the poem had to end up with a debate and a solution to the debate. So a particular other person ended up being externalized. I called her "she" rather than "he" for "political" reasons - because if there is no particular reason for a character to be of any particular gender, you might as well default to female so as to avoid the assumption that default people are male - similarly to how, when writing an essay, I generally alternate between calling indefinite people "she" and "he" but am always quite careful to call the first one "she,' not "he" - and for personal reasons - because I did come up with both sides of the argument, and I'm female, and because when I imagine an arbitrary friend to take a trip like this with or to have this kind of conversation with, she's more likely to be female in my mind than male.
3 comments:
WOW! Well so far I read Morning and Afternoon. will save evening for tomorrow. Brilliant! So complicated yet put so beautifully and I can so fully understand and relate. BRAVO!
okay, now in the middle of Night. Loving it. In the meantime can you explain a bit about "gravity" and something about who "she" might be.
Thank you.
Thank you for your kind words! I'm glad you're enjoying it.
Gravity, is, well, gravity. I think that the line "violence is the force that pushes us on" came to me first, but I'm not sure I remember how I got from there to the idea that other forces were involved too. On some level, I think it just seemed obvious enough to me that a river flows downstream because of gravity that I felt it needed to go in there. To the degree that gravity becomes metaphorical or symbolic in the poem, I suppose it's symbolic of scientific law or natural law in general, but I think that mostly gravity is just gravity. The part about gravity, desire and violence was really something I came up with for the first part that ended up being increasingly important as I continued to develop my ideas for the poem rather than something that was a key part of the imagery as it first came to me, so it ended up playing a large role, but the fact that gravity and desire ended up playing such a large role in particular was to some degree unintended at first?
I came up with the image that prompted the poem while considering a social problem in a social context, so it became important to me to write a poem that wasn't only about a single person's journey, as that wasn't really relevant to what I had been thinking about. I think some of my first few aborted tries may have been about only one person, and that might have been one of the reasons why I didn't find them satisfying? At any rate, it was quite clear to me from the beginning that it had to be more than one person making the journey. I kind of wanted to keep it ambiguous over the course of the poem as to whether it was only two or more than two, but I'm not sure if I succeeded in the end. In the end, it turned out that, since I was pondering my own thoughts about an issue when I came up with the image behind the poem, the poem had to end up with a debate and a solution to the debate. So a particular other person ended up being externalized. I called her "she" rather than "he" for "political" reasons - because if there is no particular reason for a character to be of any particular gender, you might as well default to female so as to avoid the assumption that default people are male - similarly to how, when writing an essay, I generally alternate between calling indefinite people "she" and "he" but am always quite careful to call the first one "she,' not "he" - and for personal reasons - because I did come up with both sides of the argument, and I'm female, and because when I imagine an arbitrary friend to take a trip like this with or to have this kind of conversation with, she's more likely to be female in my mind than male.
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