9
SALIENT
How does a poem become a poem?
Poet feels poetic, sees something, feels something, describes an event or memory or gut response or makes a list — writes something down, whatever. You write something and eventually you type it all up and you print it, and improve the poems that way with new printed out versions and then DTP [desktop publishing] software is useful for experiments with how a poem reads with different linebreaks and spaces. So it’s a digital process now, those poems that started out as a .txt file and then .rtf file are now an InDesign .CS3 file and then exported as PDFs and JPEGS and OGG and MPEGS and .HTML, wordpressed and instagrammed and google ++ed and routed and proxied all over, cached, bit torrented, downloaded, shared, zipped, and tarred up into an archive. Made into WAVs and AIFFS and MP4s. PHP or CSS code or rendered like max headroom in a bunch of interesting 3D ways. Thrown into Word and made into Office files. Shared on Soundcloud or Dropbox or Bandcamp or Patreon or Givealittle. Whacked up on mud book in six different places. Put onto the giant spreadsheet. — David Merrit, p.35 I always look forward to the first line. It takes about a week to arrive. Once that is done, I let the first line stay in my head for another week or so. Finally I choose to write the poem. Once the first line has come, the next lines come slowly and gently. — Bibhu Padhi, p.60 15 MAY 2017