Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

One of the basics of fiction writing, especially in the speculative genres, is world-building. More apparently realistic genres involve world-building as well, since no book can simply present reality, but the conscious act is less obvious. Poets, too, create worlds in their poems, but especially when it comes to the lyric, these worlds are presented more through the use of language and music than through content. Rhythm and rhyme–regular, irregular, or nonexistent–suggest what sort of world the words move in. Syntax–standard or idiosyncratic–diction, punctuation: all of them contribute to creating the realm of the poem.

No one would dream of telling all fiction writers that they must work within the same world. No one would demand that the same rules apply at all times so that different novels and short stories could be evaluated according to the same criteria. There are still a few who say this to poets, however. This includes those who extol the virtues of traditional form as well as those who demand specific programs of experimentation.

I have no objection to those poets who wish to lay out a description of the world in which they work so long as their intent remains non-evangelistic. For myself, however, I think that working in the same world all the time would get boring. At the moment, in addition to working in my better-known long-but-broken line, I am also writing poems in which each line contains a limited number of words, typically 2-3. In some poems, each line has the same number of words and in others the number varies according to a pattern.

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