Why anyone would want to look obscure, experimental (whatever that is),
pretentious or postmodern (whatever that is) is beyond me.
It never occurred to me one could get sex by them. I think
intelligently-timed asking is probably a better bet
Sometimes when I look at a / in the middle of the poem I have no idea why
it's there (and sometimes it's my poem; but then I feel that about lots of
things in lots of poems (and sometimes theyre mine); and some of those poems
are rather good (occasionally mine)
when I use / *now it is because - I think - I am after a feeling of a
pause - a hiccup yes - without a full line break...
one could do that with spaces and I have done - there's always a number of
ways to do things - transfer between computer programs tends to swallow up
spaces but / survives
sometimes when I look at line breaks in others and hear the poet read
through them and then stop in the middle of a line for no apparent reason, I
wonder why the line break is there
I have a book coming out next year which has / abundantly in one or two
pages which are there, I think, to indicate points at which the voices (when
read with two voices) might swap control of the line without insisting i.e.
leaving control but not complete control to the readers; and / or they
suggest - to me - a staccato and fractured tone - the lines are disjunctive
anyway but can readers can smooth those in the utterance, and sometimes one
wants greater disjunction and sometimes one wants less
one *could do much with space
but that makes for spacy feeling
and, in this case, I want a busy claustrophobic effect
for me it isn't use of a convention but a trying out of how good the
conventions are, how to do things that aren't allowed for within conventions
i never used them because shelley didnt or because the beats did or because
they were on my keyboard
i used them because i saw them being used interestingly and sometimes
puzzlingly, experimented with them, overdid it probably, abandoned it and
then found it was there as a technique when (rarely) needed... sometimes /
will appear and disappear again in the development of a poem, part of the
thinking
I use / a lot in writing down ideas... a lot of poem fits on a notebook
page with the use of /
and it's a quick sure way of reminding myself I am thinking of two lines of
space if I write //
L
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