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

I have been playing around with writing poems that take after traditions in conceptual art, in which the poem is more of a figurative object, not an actual poem, but an idea of the poem for the reader to engage with.  To offer an example;

Morning Poem

My poem is the words you would use to describe the sky the last time you were awake at dawn.

I am aware that many people would probably laugh at me for a thing of that sort, and would assume it is not a serious endeavor, but the point is, in part, to question what a poem is, to examine ideas about what it means to say a thing is a poem.  I claim that this is a poem, and that the words of it are not the words written here, but are the ones that come in response, and that I am the writer of that poem.  At the same time, this kind of work has to be irreverent, by the nature of what it means to challenge the status quo, and I recognize that work of this sort of work can seem silly, but I think that silliness is a result of the fact that it stretches the idea of a poem so far out of shape.  Encountering it, I can imagine easily that it might not make sense to some readers, but that is a necessary aspect of the work itself.  I do wonder whether poems of this sort would be accepted for publication, to be honest, and I think it is the kind of work I might never be able to do without establishing my ability to write more traditional pieces first.