what is a poem i think it was yeats that called a poem the best words in the best order and that is not an inaccurate description but i do not think it captures all of what a poem is let me start with communication communication is a transaction an exchange between two people or entities in which one the speaker/writer/communicator gives the other the reader/listener/consumer a set of ideas / a wireframe organization of a concept / a set of reasons/instructions for action in many kinds of communication for example speeches reports or advertisements the kind of ideas transacted are generally factual/logical/brain-based in nature in art these ideas are emotional/heart-based in short art is to emotion as an article is to information i think art should strive to transmit the emotion the author feels as efficiently as possible to the reader of that art in order to do this multiple notation systems have been devised music is the most notable example that comes to mind as it has the most rigid style but grammar as used self-consciously in writing would be another example poetry has only a very loose set of rules and assumptions that allow it a sort of notational language and this is complicated by the fact that when writing poetry the author writes for a different medium poetry is meant to be performed aloud this makes the notation system even more important but again it is hard to come up with a system that will be read mostly the same by most people what i've been trying to do since i began writing is develop a personal notation system or what i think most would refer to as my voice as a poet/writer i personally do not like the word poet as it sounds pretentious to me i'm aware i should get over this however there were some places that still needed improving from my draft manuscript most notably my prose in rip tide of memory now only rip tide and amber alert i rewrote each to tighten their syntactic and idea rhythm to make them move more lightly and gracefully the most notable difference in my series is the reordering of poems within it i think that in my first draft i spent so much time on getting my individual poems tight and polished that i threw them together somewhat haphazardly using a loose thematic correspondence with the fake table of contents with the new order i hope this has been fixed the piece consists of six sections each with three poems a new one everything stays the same makes the totals correct each section has a thematic/emotional/personal element that ties the sections together they are ordered by the order in which i wrote the sestinas at the beginning of each section which works out to make the series move from identity to memory to a feeling of universal justice and from there to a discussion of death and something like love that culminates in an exploration of the nature of time and cosmology the piece is bookended by the fake table of contents provided at the end as an ironic commentary on the rest of the text and an about the author section i think it works better this way and i think the about the author at the beginning serves as a fair prelude poem to the piece i'm excited to be a writer like i have not been before