Man, it's feeling autumnal here in Akron, OH. I am completely obsessed with a new series of poems I am writing. I just had to grapple with whether to use quotes and italics or to make a quoted part of a spoken passage non-italic. But that's pretty much the only thing I don't love about these new poems. I'm not bragging, just enthusiastic.Maybe I do have a little extra swagger thanks to Kyle Minor's incredible reading of some poems from Saint Monica over yonder at HTML Giant. What a delight to wake up to. I am filled with gratitude!
For some reason, a poem doesn't feel completely real until I print it out on paper. I wish I could get past that, because it's silly. Somehow the screen just seems temporary. Like a bunch of stray light.
I guess that's what it is, technically.
I printed all these new poems up and I am taking them home with me.
2 comments:
I just printed a whole bunch of new poems on my office printer at school. Shhhhhhhhhh!!!
I write by hand in a paper notebook, so the poems become real, for me, as soon as I write them. However I have the same sense that you're talking about here, regarding the computer screen and printing poems out.
To be really really technical, the screen itself is real, as far as it goes. But the stuff displayed on the screen is, as you said, just a bunch of stray light. (Maybe not quite stray, but...) If you click on any of various buttons on your computer (some of which may be real, and some of which may themselves be bunches of stray light), whatever you're looking at on the screen disappears.
The key word here, for me, is ephemerality.
It's true that paper can be destroyed too, though it takes a bit more effort, harder to do offhand or carelessly unless you happen to be standing near a fire.
I've always been struck by the fact that whenever we want to REALLY make sure we've saved something from a computer, we print it out on paper.
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