MURDER, DEATH AND RESURRECTION

Well, I’ve just renamed my poetry manuscript MURDERING AND DYING.  New title: MURDER, DEATH AND RESURRECTION. No, I’m not doing Jesus Christ, but after trying to write what I thought would be my poet’s obituary (and stop writing poems), the Muses instead gave me the gift of creating a poetry generator. Eternal life through eternal poem-generation!  Told you the Muses both bless me and have a perverse sense of humor. 

(An example of a poetry generator is the brilliant Sea and Spar Between by Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort that can generate 225 trillion stanzas (!).)

More details later on my own poetry generator project but suffice it to say I was consulting with The Poet Who Knows Everything about quantifying the number of poems that could be generated by MDR and our preliminary estimate is the equivalent of sand grains on all of the planet’s shores ….  Point is the project can generate an almost infinite number of poems on its own without me doing any new writing -- maybe I can finally hide from the ridiculous Muses!

Or, put another way, I began to write the novel that I thought I was writing in a composition notebook like the above image.  Well, here are the pages that I was able to devote to the novel to date:

That's right.  A skinny number of pages.  Compare that edge with the pages devoted to poetry -- it overcame the novel!

And now I begin a second composition notebook.  Well, I'm just going to give into the flow and finish out MDR -- I've written 15 of the 25 sections.  Unless I punch out the next 10 sections, I can't return to the novel.  I've waited 40 years; what's another couple of weeks ...

I hear the steel-winged angels cackling and the sound they make ain't music.