Thoughts accumulating slow.
To draw or take a photo or make a book cover there’s a visual hierarchy by size, proportion, detail, focus.
In stories I may take out extraneous, keeping the salient through-line.
In haiku I pare to concrete essentials where every syllable, phoneme and space must earn its place. A sonnet is an argument structure. People like the work done for them with a tidy package. Creativity is choosing aspects and distilling.
In free verse poetry is it the same work or objective? I accumulate things noticed which can read tonally flat. I let the reader add emotion and response rather than coach, which would underestimate reader and seem a propagandic bias. Where I add humour or a lede, is it caught if not signalled to?
We each have chaos and randomness and data. It is not value added to not speculate on a pattern. To hold these cards to chest risks being inscrutable. To lay all down is prosaic, but to unpack a little may be necessary framework to be understood how I see things relating and why.
I like the mandala of everything in a poem, the leaching in, the leaking on, the letting out, the marginalia, the parts that don’t fit, the honouring of non-story, of no-conclusion, of clustering bits, of oblique, of pointing at wonder and neutrality and grief in everything.
If no pattern, why gather, why present it?
But there’s white matter connecting under. It is not as obvious as a true or false sonnet or multiple choice haiku, or an isolate mood or depiction of diorama of traipsing a crying figure along a seashore.
It is open to inference instead of deduction. invitation to look together instead of echo each other.
It’s another kind of reportage, reflection, assembly of things that hang together and matter in a similar inclusive ample way.
What draws suspense through a poem’s frame?