You can also read Sixteen, sans the backstory, by clicking on the link.
I have a tendency, (sometimes, not always), to call… “version 1″ a draft that I’ve actually been working with for a week or two. As long as I haven’t made major editorial changes, (and as long as I haven’t posted it before), I tend to think of these drafts as version one. “Sixteen” is an exception, as was “Hospital Next Right” — I wrote both of these pieces yesterday. After I wrote “HNR” and started to spaz a bit about the inability of (my) poetry to not be depressing, I felt part of me rebel against the desire to throw this project out the window by insisting that the self who had no voice during that time — the period of illness and the beginning of recovery — deserves one now. Since I had been thinking that one way to work my own (fuller) voice into these poems more would be to play with writing them as spoken-word pieces, at least in the beginning, I let that 16-year-old voice write a letter to me in the s-w genre. I think it might be interesting to try a series of spoken-word pieces conversing between me-then and me-now, discussing what happened, why I don’t want to put it on a pretty pedestal (or bring it out of the cobwebs of the cellar in the first place) and whatever else comes up in the process. So, prepare yourself for that possibility.
I already know some of the changes I want to make to this piece, and one of the best tools I know for editing spoken word pieces is beginning to memorize them (for a video). But I figure if this is truly the work-in-progress journal I’ve always asserted it to be, I should show the work, and the progress, and so forth. So: “Sixteen” (in what is truly Version1).
* I like the idea behind this project. It will be interesting to see how much of the present-you is infused with what you channel as past-you.
* Are the majority of your pieces on this site transcribed spoken word? (Why do you only video some of your poems?)
I think it could be an interesting project. And I suspect The Therapist will be pleased.
Actually, the majority of the pieces aren’t spoken-word. The only ones included here that I think of as spoken-word are the ones that have videos. (With the exception of “Sixteen” which I haven’t recorded yet.)
Ohk. So one more pick-your-brain-question: do you go into writing a spoken word poem any different than you would a regular poem? (Focus more on structure for spoken, etc?) I find I focus more on strong imagery and interesting sounds. Then i go back and reluctantly cull hard to say phrases.
I love that someone is actually interested in this stuff.
I do write differently, actually, based on whether it’s a spoken-word poem or not. I tend to write the s-w pieces in fragments, which I weave together later, and I often write those fragments (or large portions of them) in my head, reciting them aloud to remember them, instead of writing via a notebook or computer. The other pieces I tend to sit down with more, and I have a bit better plan ahead of time of what I want them to be; (they’re also a *little* more likely to look at the end like what I expected, in the beginning, I’d be writing.) So I would actually say I focus more on structure, at least in the prewriting stage (to whatever extent I have a “prewriting” stage), in the non-sw-poems, although I try very hard to make sure there is a structure in the s-w poems, as I revise them.
And I’m kind of all about how things sound regardless of the (sub-) genre, although that’s less evident in the project I was working on for a class recently because the prof who was guiding me is a huge opponent of interesting sounds. I’m hoping I can shirk that particular piece of his influence soon.
And now I have to go track down some of your poetry; you have me curious.
[...] a (strange) respect for the fact that these are (largely) the exact words I used at the time. The conversation series I spoke of attempting between my sixteen-year-old and current selvese seems stalled, largely [...]