Lance
Wagner's Commentary
Freewriting is one of the
exercises I taught Raychel when we were together. Before Raychel
and I met, she had written her poems when the mood struck her. I
showed her several exercises meant to allow that mood to be summoned
at will. For those of you less proficient in the fine arts,
freewriting is just free associating between your hand and your
mind. You just get a pen in your hand and continue
writing. More often than not, the writing is gibberish.
However, if you keep grinding, sometimes you can get something from
yourself which you never even knew you could get. I use this
method exclusively to great success.
Laura
Douglass' Commentary
Raychel hated freewriting. Not the poem, the exercise.
I've heard the theory that if you give a room full of monkeys each a
computer and let them type that eventually one monkey will write
Hamlet. Lance may not look like one, but I like to think of him
as the monkey sitting next to that monkey.
Sharon
Wolfe's Commentary
There's an inside joke in this poem that few people would understand
without some background. Raychel hated freewriting, but when she
was with Lance he kept trying to get her to use it. She used to
refer to him as "The Grinder" because he could blow fifty
pages of paper in an afternoon and get two decent sentences as a
result. Worse, he was happy with that kind of output.
Anyway, every time I read "the grinder whines/return" I hear
the word "return" in Lance's voice. The joke is that
Lance loves the poem, and it is a total slam on him as a writer.
Painseeker Reader Renee's Commentary (11-14-2001)
"I miss the spike, its force of entry the flash of painful probing
creation, at the bloody child before me."
It seems many of Raychel's writing point to childhood sexual abuse.
Perhaps she subconsciously got more of out 'grinding' than she
realized?
