31 March 2004. Weird. I've been feeling very tired/sleepy lately, a bit like I was when hypothyroidal, but not as bad (though seeming to go that way). At the same time, and this is what's weird, I seem to be teeming with ideas, and enthusiastic about them! I had some on my bike ride to Charlotte High this morning that I jotted down as soon as I got to the classroom I was assigned to. Meanwhile, I had the further idea that use notes like these as blog entries, with or without commentary. After all, I love to see rough drafts of artworks, so why shouldn't others? Aside from that, it would make my blog even easier to keep up. (Due to my competitive nature, it also occurred to me that maybe no one has done this on a blog before! It wouldn't seem that could be true, but who knows. In any case, I hope my example encourages others to do this, because I think it could be valuable, and appealing both to the one posting rough drafts and fellow artists, not to mention students of the creative process.)

At the heart of the jottings above were two thoughts. The first was my realization that I'd never made a mathemaku that was just an element in a larger poem. That thought crossed my mind because yesterday I added a mathemaku to a piece Kathy Ernst and I are collaborating on, and noticed at some point that it was not central to the work. The mathematical portions of the mathemaku in my gallery are often graphically less than the rest of the pieces they're in, but they are still aesthetically dominant, the rest of the pieces being mostly merely background.

As I ruminated on the use of mathemaku as possibly secondary features in larger works, I realized once again how much I enjoy thinking about how I work as an artist. That reminded me of a recent discussion I was involved in at New-Poetry about why people compose poetry. Ha, I thought, my main motive for doing poetry is to watch myself do it! I bet none of the other New-Poetry participants would ever mention that as why they did poetry!

It's a near-truth that the study of the creative process is more interesting to me than anything else in life. And where better to study it than in the lab of one's own mind?

But poetry is fun for its own sake, too, so I abruptly found myself pondering ideas for poems using mathemaku rather than being mathemaku. I thought of one of my mathemaku in with a "division shed" gliding through some kind of space is closing in on some colored words that may make a good dividend, which I think is the only poem I've yet done that makes a mathemaku an actor in a larger script. It's the main actor, though, not just an element in the script. This mathemaku got my thinking, as I have before, of mathemaku floating in a sky. That would mean I'd need something non-mathemakuical under the sky. The sea came to mind, a Wallace Stevens sea: or a graphic suggesting waves that was composed of fragments of a Wallace Stevens poem on the sea, or maybe more than one such poem. I could have at least one long division using clouds as a dividend. Because I associate clouds with innocence, "innocence" was my immediate choice for a divisor; "chemistry" occurred to me quickly after that, for clouds result from chemistry. Then I thought of the secrecy associated with chemistry, the magic, and I decided to have the letters spelling "chemistry" outlined, with something within hinting of secret passages or something. (Later I remembered a Mickey Mouse comic book story in which Mickey has such a secret passageway from his backyard to his laboratory; that made a huge effect on me as a child, so I've already scanned it into my computer for appropriation into "chemistry.") Next, I thought of the rest of my mathemaku, and got a few other ideas for long divisions I may use.

I'm excited about this new work, for I believe not only that it should come out well, but because it will help prepare me for what I consider will be my summatory poem, an epic poem using everything I know about every form of poetry I know. More on that in due course.