Kim: Technology has altered my writing significantly, and I’d say for the better. I’m part of some online poetry forums that give valuable critiques. I run a poets’ blog group that gives prompts, advice and tips to aspiring writers. And most of my writing classes are online since I’m a single parent who would not otherwise get to attend college. Online email or submission managers have vastly improved the process of getting work published and also to make the work of other poets more accessible for me to read and learn from. Altogether I’d have to say that technology improves the writing process by making more information available to a wider audience.
When you craft a poem, what steps are involved?
Ron: Every poem begins with an image and a line that is slightly askew in either its grammar or vocabulary. It almost never ends where I think it is going to when I begin. I mistrust poems that don't reveal themselves as I go along. I want to be surprised when I write. Better yet, I want to be terrified. Carol: I might free write for 10-15 minutes about the desert. Then, I may use a flora map I picked up when traveling to Lake Powell to incorporate interesting, and to me, previously unknown images from the desert, like the Mormon Tea shrub. When I have a line that I really like, I’ll rush to my computer and start a new file. I’ll be revising while I write up the rough draft. Then during the next couple of days, I’ll return to it, reading the poem out loud and making changes. Let it sit and ‚rise,‛ hopefully, and then slap it down and make more changes. Repeat. Nicholas: Take away weak verbs and adverbs. Avoid overwriting and obscure images. Read it out loud and hear the sounds of it. Jessie: I normally start on paper with an idea, an image, a line, and then I just keep writing until I have nothing else. Sometimes I do this on the computer, but I prefer paper, where I just write without thinking about line breaks, etc. After I’ve handwritten or typed a draft, I try to let it sit for a few days or even a month (depending on whatever else I am working on). When I go back to it, I read it out loud to see if new line breaks start appearing. I start to remove unnecessary words. Then I let it sit again. I go back to it another day, or a few later, and keep doing that process until I am no longer changing words. This normally takes me at least a week or two of daily (or if I skip days, can take more like a month) changes before I feel like I have a poem that’s ready to submit somewhere. If the poem is then rejected by a publication, I go back and read it again to see if I want to make any new changes before I send it back out, because the time it was away being considered for publication can really give me much-needed distance.