On This Thing I've Been Writing

So it's been 22 days for this NaPoWriMo project. Like I said in my first post, this was a project I had been thinking about--some of the poems had already been written, but all the poems posted on the blog are new versions. Most are quite different from their previous incarnations.

I did have one hiccup on Day 19, I believe. I got tired of the epistolary pieces, so I did something else, revisiting another sequence/series by constructing a new "Self Portrait" poem.

Anyway, regarding the epistolary project, a few things I've discovered:

1) The setting is, in my mind, a different reality or locale. I don't think it will work as a real place or a real time.

2) It's an allegory. See #1. I can be as broad as I want with poem and still have it adhere to the general tone and movement of a singular work.

3) There's a character that's central to the narrative--The Artist. But the artist is not the speaker. The artist is the subject, in a way, though he/she is not always in the epistolary pieces. I'm still discovering this character and his/her relation to the speaker.

4) The "Redaction" sections are newish--I saw the idea of pentimento in painting as applying to these sections, where there are smallish, minute "edits" to the previous narrative. I haven't figured out how or why these occur in the pieces, or if there is an occassion for the changes.

Some questions about the direction of this thing:

1) Is it a long poem as I had first suggested?

2) While, tonally, it seems consistent, is there enough variation to move a reader forward?

3) Should there be "Setting" pieces interspersed throughout the project's current narrative? In other words, should there be different poems that not only disrupt the "Dear Empire" pieces, but poems that contextualize the very ambiguous epistolary pieces?

4) Who is the speaker? What's at stake for him/her? He/she is the lens of the piece, and indeed, he/she is writing to "Empire."

5) Who is Empire?