No News Has Meant Good News

Two months. Quite a stretch. I can't honestly say I haven't been blogging during that time, as I've kept up with writing Geeking with the Wife for Team Covenant. However, my electronic poetry hat has been on the shelf.

Things you should know as I get back into this:

1. Kate got hired as an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee - Martin. This is very big news, and I'm incredibly proud of her. I'm picking up 2-3 classes as an adjunct and quite look forward to them. We're moving in early/mid July, with a house picked out and to be closed on in mid June. We're going to have a big yard again, which the dogs will love. We're both going to be teaching, which we will love.

2. The creative portion of my dissertation appears to have been satisfactory to all members of my committee. I'm now working, more slowly than I'd like but nonetheless deliberately, on the scholarly portion. The current realizations/fears - I'm writing about an aspect of several poets that I've never seen discussed. I can't find literature on it in their work, specifically. There's the first-level fear of the researcher, which is to wonder if I've just missed something, a conference paper, a dissertation, an interview. The second-level fear is that my committee will have a fit if I have extended tracts of my dissertation that are just me, a little bit of theoretical backing, and a whole lot of original analysis. Tradition has been stressed to this point, hence the worry.

3. I've thrown my hat into the slam ring once again, and most likely for the last time (due to the logistics - Martin is three hours from any major city). I've made the team from Manchester, NH, and I'm in the finals to qualify for the Providence, RI team on June 3. The semifinal bout in Providence was particularly skin-of-my-teeth. If you think you'd be interested in hearing about it, let me know. I can make it the topic of a post.

A moment of crisis

Vis a vis diluvium

My heart is a modernist one. I like thinking all this knowledge will do me good some day, that Noah and his wife are on a trajectory that leads them to enlightenment, that all the languages of the world can swirl around each other into one clear symbol, that there is a (G)god who responds to the prayers of two people alone on an ark. My mind is a postmodernist one. I end up thinking that, as I put it in another poem, “knowledge is merely that / which is forgotten,” that Noah and his wife will end up landing in the New World and starting the events of El Oceano y La Serpiente all over again (or perhaps it will be one of the ships they create from their wants that lands on that shore and destroys the Aztecs or whoever it is in that dimension), that all the languages of the world swirl around each other and just create more language, that (G)god doesn't get his/her/its/their own font and is therefore everything and nothing in this poem from the very beginning.

Can I have both? Can I?

Providence, Post Office, Publish, Perish

Thanks to the crowd at Blue State Coffee for a nice show last night. Witty hosting by Tony Brown and Ryk McIntyre. It was also good seeing Megan Thoma, Mike McGee, and David Perez read again. If you want to laugh your butt off, Megan's featuring later this month. I'll put up info when I have the exact date. If you want somebody else roaming the lines between slam and academia (in this case an MFA), check out David Perez tonight at the Cantab or Friday in Manchester.

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I'm about to send out a lot of stuff.

I've been bad in the last year about submitting work. I've been concentrating so much of my energy on producing that I've forgotten about the whole publish/perish dichotomy, which is especially important since I'm going on the job market this year. I look around at some of the MFA grads with whom I'll be competing and know that I'm competitive as far as total publication records go. I'm no Seth Abramson, in all the named journals (and probably never will be), but I've got a few decent journals under my belt and three chapbooks through real publishers. diluvium will of course be the big shot this time around, and I'm sending it to the major first-book contests: Yale Younger Series, Whitman, Bakeless, etc. But I'm also pulling out the individual poems that have until now been serving as fodder for the ocean in diluvium and sending them out to journals. I've gotten positive responses on them from some poets I greatly respect (and who would both know good stuff when they saw it and not BS me about whether or not what I'd just shown them was so). We'll see how the readers react. As usual, my big problem will be choosing work. That is:

I'm one of the few poets I know who doesn't quite have a shtick. Whether it's performance or written work, I write a wide range of material. On the one hand, it's great when you see it all together. These sets that I've performed at Worcester, the Cantab, and Providence have been like one-man variety shows in a sense. I've written before about The Icarus Sketches / The Icarus Series and how it forms a spectrum of Icarus poetry. But when I just have to choose 3-5 poems to send off to a journal, I get a bit lost. Do I choose the ones that have similar themes? Similar styles? Do I try to show off range and therefore pick three very different poems? Grouping by style is usually the safest bet, as the journals I've seen tend to choose this way. And yet it chafes me. That's another reason I haven't submitted much lately - it hurts to break pieces apart instead of letting them build up into a greater effect. It also hurts to say several things that are all very close to each other (though I suspect my "very" might be "somewhat" for others).

If you've read any of my stuff in the past year and have suggestions of places I can submit to, let me know. In the meantime, I'll be going through back issues, looking for similarities in style, and sometimes comparing to Jeffery Bahr's Publication Ranking list. I prefer to submit to places that I think look good, which is not to say I'm being shallow, but that I particularly like journals that have a coherent aesthetic that extends even to the production of said journal. I have to admit that some of my submissions this time around, however, will be based on the reputation of the journal, deserved or not.

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Lastly, I'll likely be blogging a bit more this month. Ironic, given that I'm starting an adjunct professorship at the University of New England as well as continuing work on my dissertation. If I'm going to have less time, I might as well have drastically less time.

Smooth, Not Criminal?

Most of the poetry in diluvium is my own. All of the central 8-line poems are original, and the vast majority of the lines in the surrounding ocean are either created specifically for this sequence or adapted from other poems of mine. There are, however, some exceptions that I fear may cause me trouble later on.

I quote from a huge variety of sources, anything from two to eight lines: song lyrics, poetry, computer error messages, scholarly works. At the end of the sequence, I plan to include a Waste Land style set of endnotes: On page x, the lines that begin with y come from source z. In no way, shape, or form do I wish to plagiarize, just collage.

I've recently become concerned about the different between plagiarism (which is readily solved by providing credit where credit is due) and fair use (which is concerned with protecting the use of exact words, whether or not credit is provided). That is to say, if dreams come true, and diluvium gets published, can the poets and bands I crib from come after me for using their lines without permission, in a context they didn't approve?

I'm already starting to write some of the poets, some of whom I've met and will probably be OK with the project. Some are dead, but their works are still under copyright. Some are so big (e.g., U2) that I'll never hear anything regarding permission to use the lines until there's actually a book coming out. I'm going to let large fish and dead fish (who are large by virtue of being controlled by publishers more than individuals) get fried by the publisher, whoever that is, when the time comes.

Anyone out there do a lot of collage work and/or a lot of quoting and have any advice? Am I just being paranoid, since nobody comes after poets for this kind of thing anyway? Am I just being nice, since I might not really have to (by virtue of being under the radar) but choose to tell the people I'm quoting?

Another diluvium sneak peak

I'm realizing that I don't so much mind putting samples of diluvium up here. As I learned with El Oceano y La Serpiente / The Ocean and The Serpent and The Icarus Sketches, people react quite strongly (in a good way) to the finished sequence, but very few journals are willing to touch the individual poems. Here's a draft of Noah's wife on page 19, fretting about the rut they've gotten themselves into:

OE

Anyone out there remember their Old English rules better than I do?

I'm trying to make the smallest of adjustments to Caedmon's Hymn for part of the ocean in diluvium.

It currently reads:

Nu sculon herigean heofonrices Weard,
ece Drihten, or onstealde,
heofon to hrofe, [eth]a middangeard,
abieteende

Which in contemporary English would go something like

Now we must praise heaven-kingdom's Guard,
eternal Lord, the beginning established,
heaven as roof, then middle-earth,
breaking [with implication of storms]

I'm also thinking about replacing "or onstealde" with the bit from the line below, "He aerst sceop" (He first made), which is a bit better sensewise even as it discards the alliteration.

I got Cs and Bs in my OE and Beowulf courses due to trying to create good poetry instead of laser-accurate translations, but I don't want to totally botch this one. Any help is appreciated.

Revolutions, Roleplaying, Reverse-psychology

A belated Happy Independence Day to those of you celebrating it. Here's my day-after sketch, whilst thinking in the backyard about revolutions:

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A bit I'm incorporating into diluvium from the smartest role-playing game ever devised, Nobilis. Most RPGs have what's called flavor text, wherein the quantitative component of the game is expressed in more qualitative terms. For something like Dungeons & Dragons, you'd get something like: "Rekzor advanced and smote the goblin on the head with his glowing mace (critical hit with mace +1). Nobilis has flavor text like this:

Once, a man was so well-liked that he set the fields ablaze and the peasants didn't mind.

Then he killed all the animals, gave his folk dust to eat, and they didn't mind.

Then he dirtied the water with blood from his wars, and they didn't mind.

Then they tortured him slowly to death on the Stone Wheel, and when his heirs asked the peasants why, they said, "We thought he liked that sort of thing."

Or, the lines I'm putting into diluvium:

8. Lady Urvasi and Lady Iya stood at the entrance to Hell. "I am strong," said Urvasi. "I can survive the worst torments of this place."

9. Lady Iya said, "You are strong; but is that strength an asset, here?"

How often do you get a game that lets you argue serious philosophical points not as a sidebar, but as one of the primary goals of the experience? It's like a living Sandman comic.

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Lines from my spoken-word/performance piece "Zahir," which will end up on the same page as the hell bit from Nobilis:

Don't think of a tiger.
Don't picture the black and orange stripes undulating through tall grass.
Don't image the huge pads silent as the new moon, the low rumble of thunder in the lungs, the electricity in the sinews that precedes the rush and clutch, the chaotic tumble, the crunch of a dead deer's vertebrae.

One clear note

You may or may not have noticed the weeklong break. Been productive. Here's a rare share, two central poems from diluvium. These are part of a conversation that represents a pivoting moment. Noah's wife has begun to leave her depression, having realized that she can take control of her own life. Noah is still in the doldrums, and these two poems are the part of the conversation where she says something that finally gets him to realize that he, too, has the power to endure.

It's the hitting,
not the bottom,
that hurts, mistakes
cause for symptom.

I was wrong.
Go below.
Put your pain
in one clear note.

This moment, incidentally, contradicts an earlier, snarkier note from her that said nobody goes into the underbelly of the ark in order to create art, but to shovel shit. She then spends her own alone time down there and does in fact come to a realization (for which you'll have to wait for the book). Now she can both apologize and stand over Noah on real terms.

Been singin' Blues all this time.
Yes, I been singin' Blues all this time.
Baby, I been singin' Blues all this time
and it never crossed my mind

that the Blues ain't all
about lack.
Singin' blue means you
ain't faded to black.

I've been working on various song lyrics in my head over the past few months, and it's really unfortunate that I'm tone deaf. Some of them are funny ("We said we'd just get a little stoned... / Next thing you're wakin' up next to me, / and I'm wakin' up in Mexico"), some are not. I've been listening to a lot of Blues, which is a useful lyrical format for diluvium, tight-packed with witty wordplay in the best of it. I'm not sure if I'll have to go back now and make Noah more of a Bluesman throughout.

"The difference between the font of 20% more

and the font of... Teriyaki / You tell me / How does it make you feel?"

Opening with an Ani DiFranco quote makes me feel better about asking a favor of you, dear readers. I'm making good progress on diluvium, and I've been reading the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman for inspiration. Not for the mythic quality, but because the lettering is really, really well done. Each character has a font and a word bubble that really expresses the qualities of that character well. The Endless in particular just match well with their fonts (not that it's quite a font, since everything is hand-lettered, but you get the idea).

The major characters/concepts in diluvium are to have their own types. Making the decisions on which ones to use is both a matter of economy (I can't afford to go buying fonts just for this) and theme. I don't want to have to label each page with the name of the speaker, and using different fonts for each voice seems the best way to go about that. With that in mind, I'm asking for suggested fonts for the following qualities:

1. Someone who is uncertain of and rightly offended by the place given her in the world, therefore she laughs a little too meanly and too readily at that world. This character will eventually find a new place for herself, one that is self-directed instead of handed down.

2. Someone who charges ahead, at first in terms of a vision that means ignoring what's around, later in terms of immediate feelings at the expense of a lost vision. This character will eventually slow down enough to really observe both immediate surroundings and long-term vision.

3. A tentative pairing or compromise between 1 and 2.

4. An inhuman view of the world, translated for our benefit but ultimately on its own terms.

5. An all-too-human view of the world, translated for our benefit but ultimately on its own terms.

Suggestions? Should I show you fonts I have available to me for free?

It's heeeeeere

Mostly I've been working on diluvium over the past few days. Am feeling pretty good about a series of exchanges between Noah and his wife meant to question their identities. This is a conversation after they've gone through their rough patch and are reinventing themselves as both people and symbols. Among the questions they have to ask - would you love me were I someone else? A different color? A different sex? The answer here will be yes. I'm just trying to find words that are simultaneously poetic, clear, and convincing.

So the poetry is here. Still getting on the ark two by two (if only it were seven by seven), but here.

In the meantime, my guilty pleasure has arrived. Photos below linked from my profile at BoardGameGeek.


Cthugrosh consumes a fleeing S-Shinobi


Despite the combined efforts of three Carnidons, Gorghadra need only stomp once to lay them flat


Distracted by two Squix, Sky Sentinel doesn't notice Zor-Maxim sneaking up from behind


We do not welcome our Martian overlords

So the game is here.

Last but not least, Kate and I are starting to catch up on Fables. The war against the Empire has begun, though we haven't yet reached an issue centering on the war itself. In related news: Willingham's Cinderella kicks ass.

If I totally lost you at any or all points during this post, my apologies. It's all straight in my head. Really.

Space and Light (part 3)

In one old volume and two forthcoming (OcSerp, the Icarus project, and diluvium, respectively), I want(ed) white space. That white space is there for you, dear reader, and I recently came across someone else thinking similar thoughts about it.

In her essay "American Poetic Music at the Moment" in Coming After, Alice Notley refers to white space in poetry as a "non-narcissistic possibility." This is precisely what I was trying to achieve in OcSerp by having facing pages mirror each other, yet contain antithetical material. It sets up a spectrum, implies by its very nature something between the pages that is lost on one side or the other. The play with history, as some reviewers noted, suggests that there are poems extending out to either side as well.

In the upcoming Icarus chapbook containing a sequence by Crystal Boson and a sequence by myself, it's not just about putting two authors in one book. It's about putting together two sequences that take nearly opposite approaches to the same project, stylistically speaking. If we're lucky, readers will find space for Icarus poems of their own. That space will owe itself in part to the space created between us and the existing batch of Icarus poetry, nearly all of it a simple retread of the myth or a reaction to Breughel's painting.

In diluvium, literal space is crucial. On days when the main characters are particularly stressed, fragments and lyrics from the edges of the page creep in and obscure the reader's view of the conscious poetic utterances in the center. This opens up a space wherein the reader is forced to negotiate among sections of the page, to establish personal hierarchies of importance, not just interpret for a single answer.

Three sequences I'm researching for my dissertation take this tack in startling ways. I may include bits and pieces of what I'm thinking about them specifically in future posts. Those sequences, incidentally, are Tom Phillip's A Humument, Anne Carson's Plainwater (which I treat as an extended sequence, not just a book containing several sequences), and Ed Dorn's unfinished Languedoc Variorum: A Defense of Heresy and Heretics.

In which I geek out...

If I say that I use Linux, I believe that I've reduced my targeted readership (meaning poets who don't use either Windows or Mac) to, um, about 1. You don't meet many Linux users at all, even when it comes to the dead-simple Linux Mint, which is my poison of choice. You meet even fewer poets/writers who want to deal with managing their operating system. They love Apple products, which "just work," leaving them to concentrate on the writing itself. I like to tinker, both with my poetry and my computer. I like having some clue about the plumbing and wiring in my house, even if I have to call an expert to fix major problems. I like to do some gardening, even if I buy most of my produce at the store (though we did sign up for a local CSA beginning this summer). One of these days, with proper ventilation, I hope to make some of my own furniture. This is not to say I'm a programmer of any sort. Rather, if you're the sort who has one thing you tinker with excessively (poetry) and are interested in controlling a few more aspects of your computer (for free), Linux Mint might be the way to go.

What follows are four screenshots with various features. Not so much a review as a view.


Wide-open view just to establish a few things. My old monitor crapped out on me. Got a new one, 20" Asus, for $120 and free shipping from NewEgg. The screen real estate is pleasant. On the lefthand side is a chat client called Pidgin. I have it set up so that I can chat to people signed into either GMail or Facebook - each chat will appear in its own window, but you can have one tabbed window if you want. That's Firefox for my web browser - the default in Linux Mint. Both of these programs come loaded right away. That's a good thing. A very cool addition that I don't recommend to new users is in the upper right. You see the clock and date? OK, that's normal. You can sync your calendar so that by clicking on the clock, a drop down month appears with the day's events. Unfortunately, you can't get a list view. I like the list, and have been talking with a great guy in Austria named Florian Dorn. His gnome-agenda program/applet gives me that list, which you see in the screenshot. It isn't actually all that tough to install, but let yourself become a bit familiar with your desktop before trying to install it. I'll happily help out if you're interested.


This screenshot will look vaguely familiar if you've been reading lately. I really like this desktop wallpaper. Incidentally, if anybody wants to know where to get any of the themes I'm showing off here (be it wallpaper, cursor image, or window borders), just ask in the comments. Two new geekeries here. One is Mail Notification. When I get a new message in GMail, even if I don't have Firefox open, a note pops up in the corner of the screen with basic information - sender, subject line, time. If I mouse over the icon, that large list appears of my 10 latest unread emails. In the upper left, my music player, Exaile, embeds the cover art for the album I'm listening to on the desktop. By embed, I mean I could put an icon or a window or whatever over it. Exaile does not come with Linux Mint by default. If you decide to take the plunge, though, it'll take all of five minutes (or less) to install.


This is what the Ubuntu wallpaper should have been. Final Exaile note - every time a song changes, I get a semitransparent popup with the song info. This info also appears if I mouse over the Exaile icon in the taskbar in the upper right.


Since I've written about composition a lot, here's my new composition setup. Yes, Pidgin is still open. Yes, Firefox is still open. But I keep everything off the desktop except my dissertation. I'm using a program called the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), which is horribly named, a little more awkward to use than Photoshop, but totally free. Linux Mint comes with this installed. Reason #1 to use GIMP: it's free. Reason #2: There are legal issues surrounding dissertations. If you create one using, ahem, borrowed software, you get in trouble. I'm doing my dissertation in absentia, away from campus, away from free access to Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. I'm not going to fork over $600 for the program(s) that will best let me write this thing. That was one of the major reasons for starting the switch to Linux about a year ago - preparation for a time when I might need it.

I've gotten used to most things in Linux. There are two major bothers, at least with this distribution*. One, Adobe Flash is often wonky. I wanted to look at John Gallaher's Guidebook today, but it won't load properly. YouTube is fine, though sometimes I get a big gray rectangle with sound instead of whatever video should load. IGN.com is fine today as well. But John's e-chapbook? I've got nothing. Two, my iPod Touch. This is squarely on Apple's shoulders, actually. I can sync Kate's iPod Nano using any number of programs in Linux. There are two music players I highly recommend, and a good four or five others that would serve you just fine. But the encryption on the iPhone and iPod Touch is different, and I can't sync unless I boot back into Windows to use iTunes. There are ways around this, but they're very, very ugly. Besides that, I'm pretty happy with the switch.

Your thoughts? Too geeky? As if being a poet wasn't pigeonholed enough?

*Linux comes in a number of "flavors" referred to as distributions. One of the most popular is Ubuntu. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but has certain codices (read: what allows you to play an mp3 or DVD) already installed. Ubuntu lets you get the codices, but doesn't come with them pre-installed for practical and ideological reasons. There are many other (valid) distributions. Visit DistroWatch.com and poke around for a while if you want to see the variety. I'm not saying Linux Mint is the hands-down best of these. I am saying that for someone who likes to tinker but A) wants to / has to concentrate on something else and B) is OS-pagan but not precisely computer-literate, this is the way to go.

EDIT: On April 2, fixed Florian's nationality from German to Austrian. Sorry about that, Florian!

Deadwood, diluvium, Conclusions, Circles

So the Deadwood: The Complete Series boxed set arrived yesterday. The physical set is put together really nicely and only cost $75 when I ordered it.

I pop in the final DVD and listen to David Milch talking about how the series ended. He is visibly and audibly disappointed at how things went down.

SPOILERS FOR MULTIPLE WORKS AHEAD

He talks at length about endings, how when we wrap up narratives we're all agreeing upon a lie - that a story does in fact end. Ironically, that's actually something I loved about the way the series currently ends. It's abrupt. It's not pretty. Everything is left hanging and therefore just about anything is possible. It avoids the huge problem, the inevitable letdown, that is the wrapup for most massive and otherwise impressive projects.

Dante's Divine Comedy suffers from this problem. When Dante the pilgrim emerges from Hell and sees the stars, they're far away, possibilities. But the closer he gets to Heaven, the more boring things become. Heaven becomes stasis. Alice Notley's brilliant and moving The Descent of Alette nicely improves upon Dante by offering up a world free from the Tyrant but not trying to replace it as the author. Monty Python realized that the hilarity of a sketch would not be undermined if they just stopped it instead of trying to find a final punchline.

A quick note before I tie this to diluvium - try to find Notley's sequence in its original publication, The Scarlet Cabinet.

Milch's comments got me thinking about diluvium and how it ends. I've long thought of the end as a lie of sorts, but my conception of time works cyclically. My dissertation is not just another book project, but an integral part of a worldview I'm expressing over the course of many books and other works. Things begin, so to speak, with El Oceano y La Serpiente / The Ocean and The Serpent. All the incidental poems I write, particularly the sequences, occur in the world as it exists after the conquest in OcSerp. The Icarus Sketches stretches itself through that world. The Angel of Music, a musical I have yet to write, occurs to either side of that world (heaven and hell are to the sides, not above and below, in this concept). After, a graphic novel, fleshes out hell a bit more. And there's a series of stories I haven't written yet that lead up to the world being flooded. Which brings us to diluvium. Noah and his wife, floating out there, figuring out themselves and each other. And I'd planned to have things come full circle, which is somewhat depressing. Despite all they learn, they are one of the ships (you didn't think it would just be two people saved, did you?) that appears on the horizon and lands at the beginning of OcSerp, and everything starts again. Although that's not totally depressing, as even OcSerp presents the existence of dissenting voices (insisting the whole time that these are marginalized by the history-makers).

Or at least that's my view if I look at it as an ouevre. But after listening to Milch and thinking about some of the works I've really enjoyed, I wonder if I should leave off an ending to diluvium. And if I do, how much should I leave up to chance? I picture myself printing off and hanging all the poems (I'm writing them as 11" by 17" pages in an image-editing program), then setting fire to the latter half and telling someone outside the room to put it out. It takes some of the power away from me. That's appealing.

Three Kinds of Braggadocio

Ron Mohring over at Seven Kitchens Press has given the go-ahead: The Icarus Sketches will appear in 2009 as the third chapbook in that press's Editor's Series. You can see the forthcomingness over in their sidebar.

I recently received two of 7KP's chapbooks - Underground Singing by Harry Humes and Still by Deborah Burnham - and the production value was quite good. I have Icarus poems out at various journals, and some have already been published. We'll see how nice I can make the acknowledgments page look by mid-2009 ;-)

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In related news, I finally have time to hunker down and work on diluvium. The recent feature on visual poetry in Poetry is heartening. I also think of the wonderful job Jessica Smith is doing to bring visual poetry out into the light. On the other hand, I have doubts any of the pages in diluvium will appear in a journal. It's just going to be too dependent on sequentiality and linking pages.

If I haven't talked to you about it recently, think of the love-child of Ed Dorn's Languedoc Variorum and Steve McCaffery's Carnival, and that's what I'm trying to do stylistically. Pair the two types of poetry that most depend on a burst of energy/imagery - that is, visual and lyric - and then extend them into an 80+ page poetic sequence.

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If you've been reading, you'll recall a previous post about me trying to freestyle. Well, I really liked the bit about boomerangs and elephant pelvises, and every once in a while I think of something that flows. I think this is going to turn into some kind of mock epic. Or mock rap epic. Or rap mock epic. Or epic rap mockery. Or something. Tentative title is "Attack of the 50 Foot Ideologies." These lines presumably will belong in the middle somewhere:

"From an elephant's pelvis I
fashioned a boomerang
that laid to waste and raised up cities
Then he came at me with a shank

shaved from an obelisk
stolen from Egypt
screaming, "I'm an objectivist!"
But I left his penis in pieces-

deflecting it with a shield
made out of Beowulf's contradictions
all the while replying, "Syncretism
derives energy from convictions' frictions."

Yeah, I get carried away. Sound does that. Haven't yet decided whether to choke it back a bit. It's a hell of a lot of fun to say out loud, let me tell you. I actually picture the line breaks somewhere else, incidentally, but there's a definite four-line rhyme box - I like carrying the energy from a set of rhymes into a new set of images.