Hi everyone! Today for Poetic Justice, I have Jessica sharing an amazing guest post today.
Poetic Justice is a month long event, beginning April 1st to April 30th in honor of National Poetry Month. Throughout April there will be interviews, guest posts, excerpts and other poetic posts. I hope you will follow along. To read the introductory post, you can find out more here
The Art of Writing in Fragments
Poetry is usually written to be read, absorbed and digested in one sitting. A single page can hold one thick stanza, standing proud as a block in the middle of the white page. Sometimes, stanzas are cut into thinner slices, like little bites of a snack—words that are easy on the mind to take in, but leave you feeling satiated after.
Writing a poem, though, is very different to the experience of reading one. Yes, I’ve written countless poems in one sitting, after a mad dash of inspiration hit me like the stereotypical writer-character in a movie. I rarely ever write pages and pages on end, because my mind doesn’t work that way. My mind works in couplets, or smaller even. I think of single lines that carry big concepts, often too big for me to explore in the moment in the middle of my daily commute, or a conversation with my family, or the most bothersome of all, while writing something else with a closer deadline and is of higher importance.
I’ve been deposited on the moon.
Like a speck of pollen from a bee’s coat amidst
the flurry of workers, sweating, in the sickly-sweet fragrance
of strange new flowers, undiscovered to man.
I wrote that verse over a year ago. It sits within a longer poem with three alternate continuations. I am considering removing one of them and narrowing it down to two, in the hopes that I will eventually realize which the best direction for the poem is. A poet should never sit idly, so in the meantime, I continue to write others. Fragments. I sometimes even extract lines and concepts from some of my short stories and try to expand it as a poem. Taking something out of context and building a whole new concept out of it can often be just as good as creating something from scratch, if not better, because you already had a strong emotional connection to your previous work.
They dive back into the rain like two birds seeking shelter,
ready to nest somewhere safe.
It’s a technique used in writing workshops and exercises, to start off with prompts or fragments. Give the same two lines to ten poets and that’ll be the catalyst to multiple new works. Why not give it a try with your own writing? Embrace the multiple strands of possibilities, the narratives and drafts of separate pieces that will eventually become one. Maybe this is the part of me that loves sci-fi, the part that loves exploring multiverses and alternate realities. Treating the writing process as an exploration through your own imagination will take you to places you never knew existed.
Don’t let the fear of ‘wasting time’ stop you from being experimental and brave with your writing. Verses can be stitched together, poems can be melded into one and fragments can become the seeds of something much greater later on. It’s a lesson in perseverance and patience, if anything else, to look at something that may not seem like much at the time, but continuing to mine the idea until you hit the gold sitting in the depths of your own mind.
About The Poet:
Jessica Ginting and is a writer from Jakarta, Indonesia. She is currently residing in London, England and studying towards a Master’s Degree in Publishing. Her poetry has been published in Anak Sastra, a South East Asian literary magazine, as well as other publications such as The Bristol Poetry Anthology 2018 and That’s What She Said Magazine. Her debut poetry collection, Moon Petals, was launched at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali in 2017. She is also the writer and creator of Indonesian superhero comic, ROSANA! (www.rosanacomic.com)
ROSANA!: https://www.rosanacomic.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jginting
Blog: https://jginting.com
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/
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