{"id":142,"date":"2010-01-08T08:34:39","date_gmt":"2010-01-08T15:34:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/?p=142"},"modified":"2010-01-08T08:34:39","modified_gmt":"2010-01-08T15:34:39","slug":"how-i-wrote-blazes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/?p=142","title":{"rendered":"How I Wrote "Blazes""},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve just written and posted a poem that I have tentatively titled “Blazes<\/a>.” People frequently ask how I write, so I’m going to talk about this one while it is fresh enough to remember.<\/p>\n

First, there was a Twitter event on Tuesday of this week in which people were posting poetry, talking about poetry and writing and publishing, all using the hashtag #poettues. I didn’t feel well and wasn’t really up to writing something new, so I posted a poem<\/a> I’d drafted recently. At the same time, I thought what a great idea #poettues was. I thought it would be wonderful if I could manage to post a new poem on my blog every Tuesday.<\/p>\n

I’ll regret posting a poem on Friday because of that, but #poettues was what had me thinking about scheduling time out on a weekly basis to draft a new poem.<\/p>\n

Then on Wednesday I noticed that Robert Lee Brewer had a new writing prompt up at Poetic Asides<\/a>: “take no prisoners.” For whatever reason, the image that popped into my mind was a bulldozer. I didn’t think much more about it at the time. I was busy doing other things. But the idea of writing a poem and the image of a bulldozer were planted in my mind.<\/p>\n

Later, I noticed on Facebook that Molly Fisk<\/a> had posted a writing prompt about water and another one about a falling apple, which reminded me of Newton’s gravity explanation.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, on Composing with Images<\/a> the weekly theme was moon.<\/p>\n

Thus, this morning when I pulled out a legal pad and a black gel pen and asked myself if I had a poem in me, the images that had collected around the idea of writing in the past few days were bulldozer, water, moon, and gravity.<\/p>\n

A few months ago, my brother flipped a backhoe into his pond–not in the moonlight, but definitely because he was attempting precarious actions on a levee. It was inevitable that this would tie in with the other images, and so with that string of random pictures in my head, I sat down and wrote “Blazes<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

This is a typical process for me. I don’t always use intentional writing prompts. Mostly I pick up bits and pieces from things I’ve read or seen or heard. I take a kind of mental snapshot of anything that interests me. That snapshot gets mixed in with other snapshots. Then when I write the collection of recent mental snapshots arranges and rearranges itself in my head until a poem or something like it emerges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve just written and posted a poem that I have<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}