Structure

At this point I'm just kind of winging it. I do want to think of this repo as a single work, yet as of this moment I have no complete idea of what that work is from a conceptual or structural standpoint. As of today I'm simply dumping all new writing into a directory named "open" - at some point I will need to think more deeply about the significance of the directory structure and how it ultimately serves the poem.

Interestingly this is one area where poetry and code do share a common trait: the structure can be extremely important to the overall understanding of the work. Certainly a case could be made that the only truly important thing is the quality of the eventual abstraction that the work is designed to create. In other words, as long as the application runs without error the underlying structure of the code could be construed as immaterial. With regard to a poem an argument could be made that line breaks, and the structure of stanzas and cantos are secondary to the imagistic effect the poem has in the mind of the reader - i.e. the poem works if it runs without error.

Still, for people who value craft that is not good enough. How you structure your code and how you structure your poem are extremely important considerations that ultimately define the quality of that work. In short, if we want to get as much out of any given piece of work as we possibly can, we must not simply accept that it works. We must think deeply about how it works.

And that my friends is the intellectual thrust of this project and why I decided to explore using git and github as the primary tool for the creation of poetry. It, better than anything, exposes how it works and how it came to be.