emotional energy

for each poem in realtime babies i generated raw material — a big block of words formed by randomly recombining stream of consciousness texts, quite often using the emerging randomly selected phrases as a composition starting point.  i'd choose the phrases i'd want to use and throw away many that didn’t seem to fit.  i'd often get a phrase and revise it on the fly.  maybe there were bits that i felt were funny, bits that were surprising juxtapositions, bits pointing somewhere interesting, and bits i had no idea what they meant,  but the sound and rhythm seemed to fit into the word flow

i then read these new texts and often found several themes to go after. maybe i couldn’t articulate such themes or even understand them.  but i had chunks of something — maybe i was afraid of mom hitting me when i was little, maybe i wanted to love this girl, maybe some event wounded me. from then on i'd craft the final poem — paying attention to rhythm, sound, and meaningful moments.  i'd flow by sonic rhythm from moment to moment, and try to end with a punch line —  a lyrical, mysterious resting place.