20181102.0430

One of the things that series of verse allows is the relatively easy establishment of a buffer. The limerick narrative and the hymns against the Stupid God lent themselves to writing in chunks. Once I got going on the limericks, I would put together ten or so at a time and set up one to post on each of the next successive days; at one point, I had thirty days' posts set up ahead of time. The hymnal has not been quite as amenable to prior setup--the sonnets I usually write for it take longer to compose than limericks, as do some of the other verse forms--but I usually had between one and two weeks' worth of posts ready. And while I did sometimes err in how I set them up, for the most part, I was able to write, set, and attend to other things while my buffers ran; it afforded me more time to get things put together.
As most any student can say, it is harder to put together cohesive prose on a schedule. By its nature, prose needs more words than verse, and more words take more time to write. And if it is the case that the words in lines of verse take more careful selection and placement, it is not as if those of prose do not demand attention, themselves. Further, for me, at least, the idea of where to go in prose is far less clear than in verse, almost as if falling back on structure and the kinds of figuration that poetry prizes more than prose lifts me to a better vantage point. That, or I see less far ahead in composing a limerick or a sonnet than in writing something that might be an essay, even as it does not follow the same set of conventions students believe they learn.
I run into another problem as I consider what to write in this webspace. Most of the prose writing I do takes the form either of reports about classroom activities or essays of a reasonably academic nature--conference papers, samples for students, or summaries and responses to the things I read. (And I need to do more reading, I know, far more than I have been.) I generally do decently with such things, and I am happy about that, but something about this webspace still suggests to me that I should follow other paths here. That is, this is not the place for me to wax intellectual about current events or to explicate materials as I used to do. But that I know what I ought not to do here does not mean I know what I ought to do here, and I need the latter more than I need the former.
Obviously, if I am to continue to put words into this webspace, and to do so in a way that does not leave me scrambling at the beginning of each day, adding stress to my life that I do not need, I shall need to give some thought to how I will proceed.