"O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead." - Walt Whitman Think back. Do you recall sitting on an uncomfortable plastic chair in a stuffy classroom trying to keep your eyes open when a teacher introduced this poem (or any of the other usual selections). Admit it, no matter how much you may love language, there was likely a poem you were taught as a teenager or younger that made your groan. You might have found the funny language perplexed you. Or maybe you didn't see how something a person wrote years before your death had anything to do with you and your world. Then, as you grew up, your love of language increased and you found yourself enjoying poetry. Now, you call yourself a writer. Perhaps you mainly write non-fiction articles or long novels, rich in detail and carefully crafted prose. Reality, I find however is that most writers will dabble in poetry throughout their careers. You might even (gasp! says your teenage self) introduce yourself as a poet in some circles, as you sit in the back of a coffee shop waiting your turn to take the microphone and share your most intense feelings. As you sit there, do you listen to your fellow poets, those who go before and those who will come after you? I challenge you to really listen sometime and see what you truly think now that you are an experienced adult and writer. Most of the time, you are going to see self-professed poet after poet reading about their intense feeling in colorful language that is really nothing more than a moment scribbled into a hot mess. Take a careful look in the mirror and you might even admit that hot mess creating poet is you, too. As I have reflected on a great many areas of my own life, I have not ignored my writing life. You might call me an egotistical ass (and sometimes, I am, I agree), but what I found is that some of my poems were very good, but others were very dreadful. Like the little girl with the curl, there really seemed to be a distinct division there. I came to realize this year that I had often fallen into the free verse trap. What is the free verse trap? The belief by egotistical poet that poetry and them are too free to be shackled by the conventions of rhyme, meter, diction, syllables and anything that has anything to do with form. When you live in this illusory world, you tell yourself that lie because really, you've never taken the time to apply those items to your own poetry. Sure, you read about such things in college probably or in your self-studies of poetry. If you went the academic route, you probably had professors quiz you on things like iambic and trochaic. You applied them to lines in quizzes and identified them in the work of the masters. Then, you put academia behind you and took up your own writing. So, why did you not apply some of the nuts and bolts to your own writing? I think the ultimate answer is that it is damn hard work and most of us are really lazy. I found countless of my own poems that I had sent out into the world. I had stunted these poems potentials by essentially sending out a rough draft, just that hot mess of emotion colliding with language and the rain came down, right?! Not really. Now, I have been fighting with form and meter and rhyme schemes and taking that raw emotion and re-working it. Have I written a great poem even in doing that? Probably not, but by exploring a variety of methods and forcing myself to see it through, I can finish any poetry writing I do with a sense of accomplishment, my "face marred by dust, sweat, and blood." (Teddy Roosevelt). I challenge you to abandon the life of a passive poet who goes to the coffee shop clutching yet another free verse poem simply because you dared not to try something different. Some poems belong to the free verse realm, but if that's all you ever write, you will never know the difference but true poets will.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
May 2023
Categories
All
|