D. E. Steward talks about his new work, Chroma

With nearly eight hundred publications, I’m beyond what I ever hoped to accomplish as an independent writer. The only thing I’ve ever taught in my life is swimming. The only classes I’ve ever taken were academic ones – and I didn’t even major in English. I’ve never had anything to do with workshop writing, never had a pedestrian job since college, and never published anything I’m not proud of.

I have twenty-five consecutive years of month-to-month poems that together form the larger work called Chroma. There are now, in August 2011, two hundred and ninety-nine of these months and I add twelve more every year. When I started them in September 1986, I saw not much point in the patterns of verse composition and was a long way from the she-said-he-said conventions of fiction. Lee Hickman used poetry sequences of mine in his seminal LA magazine, Bachy. Then he published a cluster of five of my months in the eighth issue of Temblor in 1988, his last and even more significant magazine out of North Hollywood, fully establishing me in the genre. Having written this body of unique verse/prose, Chroma, with nearly two-thirds of the months published, I think I know what I’m up to.

Cranking up the structure and method of writing a long poem every few weeks is gratifying. Irregular line breaks, fragments as verse, missing full stops, color and music motifs, and month designations are present throughout Chroma, and many months segue in some manner from one to the next. Allusions to distant places and events are not forced but mostly are a part of my experience, as matter-of-fact as riding a bicycle. The months ignore too many formalities and inflate associations too intensely to be read as randomly cohesive observation. The stanzas or fragments are pulses that coalesce from the keyboard, and writing like this probably was impossible before the computer scrolling. The text of Chroma grows, buttressed by search engines and enhanced by the ability to accumulate massively from notes, and to cut with the ease of block deletes.

D.E. Steward’s essay “Junhot” will appear in LAR issue 11, February 2012.