Yesterday, I wrote to question the limits of taking on other people’s voices in the first person as a poet, as if the poet had actually experienced the topic to know rather than just imagined it? That is, how legitimate is it for a poet to write about others’ experiences in their own voice, as if s/he could represent the collective voices of humanity? Today, I write to ask questions about a slightly different, but much more limited, poetic collective writing approach. What if the poet still wrote in the first person under the voice of another, or others, but that they had some connection to the poet? That is, collective in this sense means a very finite collective of people, rather than humanity or some segment of it as a collective. Put it another way, instead of the poet writing in the first person as if they were anyone in the human race collective that they pleased, rather than in the third person to tell about it, here, the poet is writing for all members of some small collective, like each member of a family, or both members of a couple, etc. They’d not only be a collective poet to some extent, but would also be writing collective poems where there are contributions from more than one person, all in the first person voice. How acceptable would that be, whether in general or depending on the situation?
Writing
The Collective Poet
I’ve always thought poetry as something very personal. As such, when you wrote in the first person voice, you are writing of your perspective and/or your experiences. If you wrote about someone else’s perspectives and/or experiences, like how Chaucer wrote of others’ tales, or how Coleridge wrote of Kubla Khan, among many other examples, you wrote then in the third person voice, aside from personal quotes of certain characters. However, in my newly intensified exposure to modern poetry, I have seen more examples of poets writing in the first person about perspectives and/or experiences not their own. That’s fine as a literary tool in prose, but I’m not yet comfortable with that aspect for poetry given how I associate poetry as something deeply personal, even if only on choice of expression to tell someone else’s story… as if you knew it rather than as if you were it. I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks of poetry as something deeply personal to be handled this way, but, it seems, the world doesn’t agree with me.
Karmic Rebalance
Today, I share another piece of micro writing that didn’t place in a contest. That’s fine. Like any writer, I expect a whole ton of these before success. These aren’t even manuscripts with many rejections. However, I will say this about this piece inspired by short stories in David Eagleman’s Sum about the afterlife (my favourite fiction book at this time), I might have eliminated myself in having provided a 300 word story in a contest where words in the title might have counted towards that 300 total. It wasn’t clear but I saw a note about that in some after contest promotional material after I had submitted my entry. While I could have saved it to use again, I have decided to move on and write more stories instead. Which is another thing. This isn’t so much a traditional story with arc as the short-listed stories actually were like, so I might not have given this story much of a chance even if it were accepted on word count. But I had a grand old time thinking up of the concept, then trying to describe it sufficiently fully within 300 words so I think the reader would get the same picture I had in mind. Furthermore, I had enough words left to plant a question for the reader to ponder at the end that they could, in theory, apply to the rest of their life to be influenced by my story. Enjoy! 🙂
How to Fix the Economy in 300 Words
That’s right. That’s what the title says. And that’s what the italicized text below describe. For those who think I’m too detailed and don’t look at the big picture, it’s because they only see me where I have to be the one to make things happen, and you can’t do that without details. You can’t build a car on concepts and vague ideas, in other words. For them, this should eliminate any of that. Fixing the economy, a huge problem, really only comes down to the 300 words below, which I could summarize in a sentence if I need to. For this, I’m sure many of these people who think I’m too much in the details will claim I’m naive. But you know what? I’ve gone through and grilled myself on the details of all this, what it would take to make it happen, and I’ve not been able to convince myself otherwise in the few years I’ve thought about this. If they really thought I were naive, I’ve got two words for them. Bring it! Try to win an argument against me on it! Otherwise, enjoy and let me know your thoughts if you were up to it!
Phonto and the New Instapoet!
It seems like forever since I have posted. Relatively speaking, for 2021 when I started my two year writing journey, it has been forever. Barely having missed a day, let alone two in a row up until recently, it’s been a week! But rest assured, I have been writing, just not prose. Rather, I’ve been writing lots of “modern poetry”, or what I think is modern poetry, on my microbursts poetry blog. That, too, though, would not be complete accurate. I’ve been writing a ton of drafts, but posting only a bunch, and most of which is for a secret writing project rather than that modern poetry blog I have shared.
Digital Citizen 