It makes perfect sense to me. I have tried to write magical realism prose, but the only thing I can ever come up with is for things to float. This one has an essense of magical realism. It's really good. No shame in being proud of it!
I think a good poet lives on the edge of a magical reality. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to see the little special things and put them to words.
Did this one take long to write? My favorite poems took me months, and at least one of the best took me a few years. It's still not done I don't think.
This one mostly took shape in one sitting, but it’s been revised again and again many times. Pretty much every time I take out a piece of writing, I make changes to it, so nothing is ever really finished. Although, this one might be. I only changed one word before posting it yesterday.
When I work on things, I tend to work on them for an hour here or an hour there over the years. I don’t particularly spend hours and hours on them day after day because I find that doing so usually makes me get stuck.
Writing for me works much better when it comes spontaneously. In order to keep that spontaneity and freshness, I need to feel like I’m reading my work for the first time, that way I can quickly respond to it, sense what isn’t working (for me), and change it without trepidation.
Many years ago, when I tried to write stories, I spent hours at a time, day after day working them, because if I didn’t finish them, I often found that I lost the story.
I guess poetry is the same way. If I can’t finish the basic poem quickly, then it often falls to the wayside and remains unfinished. For me, completing the general idea is important. After that, getting to the finished product is a bit of a never ending journey.
What I like about the haiku (which I’m not even sure if my small poems can be considered haiku) is the structure. For me, the 5-7-5 syllable structure is really helpful.
I can look around me and in one glance find things of possible interest, but if I can’t find a first 5 syllable line, then I know there isn’t a poem there and I can just move on.
Whereas poems that don’t have any structure at all can really take a lot of time because I often start with a specific line or image that I find interesting but then can’t figure out how to develop it.
There’s a poem that I started last week that begins, You can climb trees,
or you can climb ladders. And I can’t get anywhere with it.
I really like that line, though, and want to turn it into something, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to.
I think what helped me with the writing of the poem in this post, is that it’s working with a character and a story that was already created by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Without his winged character, and the abuse it suffered in his story, this poem and the magical elements in it would never have happened. So, in a way, maybe you could say that I cheated when I wrote this one.