Hello, friends and fellow poets!

As usual, I plan on writing a combo of poems, song fragments, prose poems and, I hope, at least one complete song by the month's end. Either way, I'll be writing in the poetry genre every day of November, and I'll also be exploring the differences between poems and song lyrics. 

In my third novel, Pimmit Run, which is currently about halfway drafted, the reader will witness two growing songwriters (siblings Peter and Rhodie Becket) who are developing their art and craft during (what they think is) the rock and roll wasteland of the 1980s. The songs they are writing are meant to stand on their own, but they are also meant to inform the reader (and themselves) about some of the subtext of the plot and of their own struggles in coming of age, and their overwhelming desire to form a band of their own. 

The songs need to form a soundtrack that evolves along with the characters and their growth as artists, their growing understanding of songwriting. The songs should act as mini-texts to give insight into their psyches. That’s the goal, anyway. Or, to quote a long-ago NYTimes critic, the ideal of song in musical theater  is to have “no separation at all between song and character, which is what happens in those uncommon moments when musicals reach upward to achieve their ideal reasons to be.” (Ben Brantley, 2008 review of the musical Gypsy).