QuickMuse is a site that asks two poets to write for 15 minutes in response to a passage, completely independent of one another, then publishes the results for all the world to see. The passages discussed are frequently quotations, varying contexts. Each of the poets’ writings can be played back in real time, exactly as they were first written.

QuickMuse is a cutting contest, a linguistic jam session, a series of on-the-fly compositions in which some great poets riff away on a randomly picked subject. It’s an experiment, QuickMuse, to see if first thoughts are indeed the best ones. [QM/about/]

I love the idea. I think it’s fun and interesting, but most provocative for two reasons:

1. The timed-write,
   an exercise were one streams words onto a page without pausing, spewing anything that comes to mind for a specified duration, is something that is lost frequently in the digital age. I did timed-writes quite a bit in college—handwritten drunken strokes in a spiral notebook. I hated the practice but almost always loved the results. There is something amazing there that frees the subconscious and eeks ideas out of the brain that any other technique would toss aside as foolishness. Couple that with wrenching pains that cramp an unpracticed hand and you’ve got fuel for novelty.

I’ve tried this with a word processor and it doesn’t work. In Microsoft Word there are no hurried pencil scrawls to get on toward the next idea in queue, or an amusing degradation of legibility as the write goes on. There is no passion in Times New Roman.

QuickMuse in just a small way brings the greatness of the timed-write into a digital format to be shared. A process thrust into publication.

2. Voyeurism,
   isn’t that a good chunk of the stickiness on this web today? Can you say MySpace? It’s great fun to see great writers doing their work. Writing the way you write—in all it’s misspelled, poorly-punctuated and backspaced glory.

They are humans too, just ones that can write better than us. QuickMuse lets us take a peak at them in action, without binoculars or the pesky legal snafus associated with breaking and entering. That, and all of the featured poets are spectacular writers, there needn’t be any other reason than that to stop by for a visit.