poetry: pantsing vs. plotting
Spend enough time in spaces occupied by fiction writers like YouTube and Instagram and you may be familiar with the idea of "pantsers" vs. "plotters." Recently I came across this piece on how process and poetic routines differ for writers. I hadn't thought these things applied to poetry at all, but then I wondered how I could have missed that they very much do. In my early days as a poet I was probably more of a plotter than I've ever been since, starting out with ideas of what a poem should be and where it should go. This, of course, led to a lot of disappointing results and failed endeavors when what you had in mind and in your head failed to come together on the page. I could have went on like this for years, decades even, writing a fair number of decent poems that met some internal set of standards. I would say its possible my entire first book, THE FEVER ALMANAC, written between 2001 and late 2004 or so, are these kinds of poems.
In the mid-aughts, I was enrolled in an MFA program, which definitely had a more experimental lean at least in terms of students if not faculty. A lot of what I was reading seemed so much more effortless and fresh than what I had been writing. I was also beginning my first forays into visual art and collage, which was subtly changing the way I wrote. Soon, I was definitely more of a pantser, not quite sure where poems were going as I mixed and matched snippets culled from notes and lists I kept of lines that I assembled into poems.
This was also true of collections, both shorter and longer ones, that were usually assembled around some general loose framework of thematic or narrative concerns, but which, for the most part, I didn't quite have fully fleshed out until the project was finished. Writing this way made it fun again and much less angsty than my first years as a poet, since much of what I discovered was far more interesting and just better in quality than what I carefully planned.
Probably a decade later, I sensed another shift in process, this time more driven by sound and rhythm than imagery, but still surprising in the results, even if I had a general idea of what I wanted to do with a given project. This of course meant, very often, what started as one thing very quickly could morphed into something else entirely, whether plot or persona or theme. A series of love poems became about the me-too movement. A set of poems about a favorite horror movie became about waiting and class disparities. A chapbook intended to be about a serial killer became more about the women whose lives he unraveled.
This was especially satisfying when creating a narrative or engaging in world-building from scratch. Which is of course perhaps when you may need the plotters the most. But I especially love the feeling of making it up as I go along, which gets me far more satisfying results than if I knew what was going to happen all along.
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