The Theme Becomes The Experience

As part of a creative writing experiment, utilizing social networking concepts like Twitter and the ever expanding blogosphere, I have generated a fragmentary poem titled “Twenty-Four Views of Hesitation,” a fractured display of a full multi-stanza work. Current readers know of my compulsion towards fractured verses, truncated stanzas, and mosaic images. Frequently the mention of found scraps of poetic phrases, and other like-minded concepts, appears in my meandering entries. This latest idea continues the various projects lingering in the streams of Internet channels.

Already on Twitter I have established regular postings of verse— @HaikuSentence — which consist of terse creative statements to fit the 140 character limit. These daily archives offer a continuous demand for poetic expression, providing an on-going challenge to find some aspect of the day and condense the events into brief lines of verse, and at the same time, follow some established expectations of the haiku form. On an individual basis, each entry stands alone, expressing a unique view of a given day.

Occasionally, some entries pick up the thread of previous line’s theme, and then shift the concepts to a slightly different direction. A reader therefore gains an abstracted sense of a given moment and then reflects on the supplied details, on a daily basis.


Twenty Four

What “Twenty-Four Views of Hesitation” proposes however is a slightly different reading experience by stalling out an extended, multi-lined poem over the course of a 24 hour period. Every hour on the hour a stanza will be posted with a common hashtag for cataloging, tagging purposes: #24HourPoem. As a result, the work itself transposes with its theme of hesitation, of expectation. The theme becomes the experience.

Individually, the stanzas reflect different moments of a collage-like action— or a fragmented perspective of awareness from an unidentified persona. Much like the process of unexpected, random thoughts, the reader does not perceive the persona’s involvement in the outside world. The reader is only brought into the impression of the outside world and the split second of acknowledgement of the persona’s interpretation of his environment.

Partly a technological-based performance piece, partly a delayed publication, the full experience is not hindered by an interrupted reading sequence. Breaks within the schedule and omissions are expected. Intervals of interruptions are planned. Just as the process of recollection is scattered and sometimes faulty, the poem itself is not an accurate recording.

Afterwards, once the cycle is completed, a full version of the twenty-four stanzas will be accessible through a posted link in Twitter for the curious. In this sense, the various fragments will be shown, melded into a whole poem, but with remaining hairline fractures. Ideally the message will be intact, regardless of the manner the form is displayed.

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