24-hour chapbook: Hours 15 and 16 (and what happened to 8-14?)

After what I put my body through, there was no way I could stay up even most of the night. So I let myself rest. And this morning I need to take my daughter out to buy some things and get in some driving practice, and then I have group therapy, and I need to find some AA meeting to go to (which typically on Thursdays is hard). Can I still put a chapbook together by 6pm? I think so.

It's not that writing poetry is easy, see. And I'm not saying that any old string of words is a poem. But any old string of words is not not a poem, see. Isn't that the point of experimental poetry? Oulipa? Cento? Found poetry? You may say none of that is real poetry, or that only when the poet approaches the random with intention and skill. I agree, completely. I was going through the Chicago Review the other day, and some of that stuff just left me cold, and some was nothing but baffling, and I thought Who thinks this is poetry? Obviously, someone does, as it is published in a (as far as I can tell) well-regarded journal. The point is that whether or not it's poetry is not up to me. (Whether or not it's good poetry is up to me, as far as I'm concerned, but that's neither here nor there.)

Approaching the random is automatically a meaning-making event. The human brain can't help but try to order the chaos.

What else? Oh, yes. I was going to say that incident and accident play major roles in poetry and its relation to the world. The influence of poetry on the world is, for the most part, incidental & accidental. Why shouldn't the creation of poetry sometimes be incidental and accidental? And sloppy and haphazard and lazy? Or obstinately obscure?

Well, that's all. Back to the chapbook. Working with variations on the sentence

the blue coat rises against the falls fills and crushes as sleeping alveoli, as lilies