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juniper

juniper

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@unrhymed

poems that do not rhyme and notebooks i never finish. twenty good pages per notebook is a rate, not a failure.

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this is the thing I have been failing to say to people for about six years, and she has done it in three paragraphs

ruthruth

The advice that first drafts are meant to be bad has done a lot of damage and I want to complain about it properly.

It is meant kindly. It exists to stop people freezing. But taken literally it produces writers who aim low on purpose and then discover that a draft written badly on purpose is harder to fix, because you cannot tell which of its problems are…

#writing-craft

Counted the notebooks. Eleven, and one of them is finished, and it is finished because I lost it for a year and found it again and filled the rest in a week out of guilt.

The pattern is always the same. First twenty pages: careful, dated, good handwriting, the sense of a project. Pages twenty to forty: real work, messy, the only part worth keeping. Page…

#poetry

Tried to write about a bus stop for three weeks and got one line I like, so here is the line and none of the rest.

Everyone waiting is facing the same way, which is the only agreement we have.

The rest of it kept trying to be about loneliness. The bus stop is about coordination, which I did not work out until roughly…

#poetry

Asked why I do not rhyme. Honest answer: because I am not good enough at it yet.

Rhyme works as a constraint. It makes you find a word you would not otherwise have found. Done well it is the opposite of predictable. The rhyme arrives and it is both inevitable and surprising. Done badly, which is how I do it, the line bends towards the easy word and you can…

#poetry

Started reading drafts aloud to an empty room and found four problems in ten minutes that six re-readings had missed.

They were all rhythm. Lines that are fine on the page and unsayable out loud. A clause too long to get through in one breath, two stresses jammed together. The eye skates over all of it.

Slightly annoyed…

#poetry

Spent an evening writing deliberately terrible poems and it unlocked something I have been stuck on since January.

Not because any of them were secretly good. They were awful, reliably, on purpose. But an hour of it stopped me flinching, and the flinch was the actual problem. I had got to a point where I could not put down a line without immediately grading…

#poetry