The discovery: everybody agreed that most of the poems we shared were better when read "backwards," from last line to first.
Why would this be?
Hard to say, but I have two theories, one reader-based, the other writer-based. The reader-based theory is that having read through the poem top to bottom first, everyone knew what to expect going backwards, bottom to top. It's rather like watching a play or a movie that everyone's familiar with, or whose subject everyone already knows well--the anticipation is pleasing precisely because you know what's coming. Shakespeare banked on this with the history plays.
The writer-based theory is that, having written the first few lines of the poem, the writer began thinking seriously about how the poem would read "in reverse" and still hang together like a poem as well or better than the "forward" version. Which is to say, writers began focusing intensely on poetic quality as the initial draft progressed, honing the lines with structure, connectivity, sense and flow in mind. Thus, the "backwards" reading began to take compositional precedence.
I think at least that might explain my own experience writing this poem . . .
The Story of the Passerby
Going by and by
all day
No matter how
fast or how far,
Wherever I find
myself traveling,
A fellow
traveler passing by,
As if to keep me
on my toes,
Leans softly
into his business,
With purpose and
like a ghost,
Mercury in Air
Jordans, maybe,
Someone I’ve
never met and never shall,
A man of myth, a
man of dreams,
A perfect,
recurring stranger
Another problem I encountered, which I failed to resolve adequately to my taste, was what to do with punctuation. Some in yesterday's salon simply dispensed with it altogether. I tried periods, semi-colons, but settled on commas as the least distracting & most accurate.
Fun project!
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