Tuesday, November 30, 2010

November is over, and with it poem-a-day month. Usually I like to print all the rough drafts I write (26, in this case), but I'll give up that satisfying stack to save paper until I can decide exactly what merits pen-and-paper editing/scribbling. I've yet to develop a real strategy for revising things, anyway, and sometimes it seems type works best. And sometimes not.

I'm pretty happy with all the new Word files in my "needs work" folder, though.

As a writer, I want us to have a gender-neutral pronoun to stand in for "generic human being." My only solution is to write in the second person when I want to dodge all the assumptions people make about gender. It's true - I don't trust readers to not make these assumptions. Perhaps one day I will. Meanwhile, "you" has a nice genderless intimacy about it, true. But what about when I want to pull my voice back, be deliberately distant, speak less to you and more about you?

You see what I mean.

I also want this pronoun for political reasons, but that's for someone else to argue more eloquently.

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