A Writer's Notebook, Day Three-Hundred-And-Forty-Seven

Recently, it was suggested to me that one of my narrative poems might provide a good basis for a longer work.  The poem itself tells a complicated story that I can see being expanded, and I am drawn to the idea at present, in part because I feel it might provide a framework for some of my work.  As I have expressed, I do feel at times that I am not certain about what to write, and have particularly been longing to get back into writing more narrative poems of a certain type, which this poem falls into.  It feels as though it could be a good way to reconnect with some of those impulses.

At the same time, I have certain concerns about expanding this poem, in part because I am not really certain what it would become. It is clear to me that, yes, there is much more in the story that could be explored, but the question is whether I feel there are themes and concepts that I want to bring out.  I can't write a longer piece that communicates merely a more detailed version of that same story, but instead need to add further dimensions to it, to give meaning to what is added that justifies it as more than just an indulgence.  

As well, I am actually worried about certain details of the poem.  In the piece, a character encounters a magical individual, a character who is not present in much of the poem.  That character exists in strange neighborhood that is taken as "foreign" by the speaker.  It concerns me that this could become problematic in a longer poem.  In this piece, the neighborhood is left mysterious, and the woman's origins are not explained either, and within the shorter poem, that is not a particularly large thing.  However, in a longer poem, that could easily become a version of certain offensive tropes that play on the idea of exoticizing foreigners or members of various ethnic groups through the use of magical qualities.  In the shorter piece, I think it is not so much of an issue, though I could be wrong about that, but I am certain that in the longer piece, it could easily become problematic.

Now, this does not mean I am not going to write that piece, but it means that I will need to rethink some of it.  I don't want to lose what is there, but I want to alter it so that the qualities which make the character and their environment strange and foreign are altered in a way that places that on the character, and with those ideas thrown into question elsewhere in the poem.  I am not certain of how this will work at the moment, as I need to really think through the whole piece at some point, but I am interested in finding how I can use this change to create a new layer to the story, one that is about the idea of encountering something and seeing it as alien, but in a way that suggests their is no real reason for the character to feel that way.  Again, I am not certain how this will work, but I find it interesting how considering this problem actually creates motivation for adding those elements and suggesting ways that a new layer of meaning might arise through that process.