> If the words dont
> pop into your head it is cheating to use your technical skill to make the
> poem. Poems are given.
That may be a little absolute. Although I often hear phrases before I
think them, the hearing usually happens in the context of a
thought-process, a deliberate search for sound and sense. One could
argue that if anything is "cheating" it's relying on naive
spontaneity, the pressure of unmediated inner speech, to write your
poems for you.
Some computer programmers have taken to using slightly zen language to
describe their activities, talking about "flow" and being "in the
zone" - as the Dilbert cartoon has it, they have attained Nerdvana.
Computer programming is nevertheless an exercise of technical skill,
even when it is guided by intuition. It would seem decidedly weird,
even to the most zenned-out keyboard jockey, to speak of a program as
"given".
Dominic
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