The Family Tree

[ellajam]

Hello Riots-

Thanks for your comments on The Family Tree.  

I'd suspect, that like most poets, ideas come easily to me.  Then I spend a lot of time editing, usually employing "clever" tricks that I use as personal "rules".  Put another way, I determine the shape of the glass, and then pour in the water. Hopefully, the glass remains transparent.

I almost never post a piece until I have exhausted my own edits. I throw a poem to the wolves to get an idea of what I missed.  And then I go back, and decide whether or not to "break the glass", if you will.

In this case, I stuck with 6 syllables per line until the very end, to intentionally punch up the ending. That said, losing a word, like "laugh", way up in L.2 will break the count, yet, probably without negative impact.  

All that said, I post with the intention of finding ways to offset my own "cleverness".  'Short and subtle' is my main rule.

Thanks again.  Any and all feedback is useful to me,
... Mark

I find when I'm working with a form and decide that a word doesn't add anything to the poem I can often use that spot to add something that does. No need to break it in order to improve it, it just takes a lot of thinking.