I vary in my sense of what constitutes writing, between the poles of writing as a construction of words, not all that different from finding a pleasing arrangement of stones (suiseki); & writing as direct utterance, a process like dowsing in that the goal becomes apparent on the way. Sometimes for me it is both, & i like this best. But i have to have discovered something. Even if it is only, that this arrangement makes all the other possible ways seem unnecessary.

Collage, preeminently the mode of the 20c, in poetry takes the form of parataxis. Usually one leaps from image to image, phrase to phrase, or sentence to sentence, "connecting the dots" of what’s left out. But the leaping itself remains arbitrary. In the Japanese form of renga, each "link" must be related to the previous & yet send those two parts in a contrasting direction from that of the gestalt formed by the previous & the next-to-previous links. These leaps have long been codified as, in chess, you can move any one of several pieces, & each piece moves in a different way. --I see bringing an awareness of "possible renga move-types" to conventional parataxis, as one means of revitalizing this rather faded modernist technique. Not that it always need be rule-bound. But there is a higher music, in the succession of one kind of leap after another. --I also feel this secondary effect in the sequence of rhyme-sounds, or in the case of "rhime", in rhime-numbers. (Nowadays i invariably alternate odd & even pairs.) --It is not inconceivable that readers may eventually learn to perceive, & prize, such rarefied frissons.