..by ruffledpanties............
____________________________________________________________________ Simple Reality And Poetry Poetry is different from prose in that it never forgives banality. Even poetry based on personal experience must have something of the universal to make it significantly divergent from ordinary diary entries that catalogue day to day feelings or observations. In poetry, the writer converts experience symbolically to carry the writing beyond mere introspection into a kind of meditation that is an art form. The most obvious difference is---or should be---language. A confessional style is fine as long as the writer does not lose sight of the fact that, for example, the personal sorrow they describe connects to sorrow we all feel being human, and that it's done by losing the self in the poem so that what is heard is not the mewling of one individual voice, but the undeniably larger voice of 'everyman'. Loss of love should not be so particular in detail and turning inward, that unless you were on that pier, on that day with that breaking heart, you're an outsider, and really could not care less for whom that particular bell tolled. Themes of loss seem, to me, to be the most prone to disconnect from the reader and become too internalized to be shared. But tell the story effectively, and every heart will break in the reading, and no one will have that peculiar voyeuristic sense of eavesdropping on someone's private conversation with self. And although we do not frequently pepper our everyday speech with imagery, imagery in poetry- along with aural devices such as alliteration and assonance and consonance, are the very stuff that sets poetry fundamentally apart from prose. They are the tools that color the words in ways that allow the reader to share in the poem by actually experiencing it. There are natural rhythms to language that can be heard and accentuated to bring it to life. A poem should not be about sadness, the poem should be sadness itself. If writing in the first person, and being a nine year old afraid of the dark, the reader should feel the knobby knees under scratchy covers, hear the floor creak, the scab loosen painfully from an elbow as a vulnerable child thrashes about with a nine year old heart flopping inside a skinny chest. And the moon should grin..........coldly. Another common mistake is to tell everything. Everything is always too much. There should be spaces in both the meaning of the poem, and in particular lines to allow for the reader's own interacting with the words. Mystery is a thing poetry has that so often eludes ordinary daily life. Tell a thing exactly in the way way it's observed, and I guarantee it will read like a journal entry and not a poem. Let your imagination loose, allow the words to become playful, make leaps you would not make in retelling the same thing to a friend, and you will begin to hear a little music. It is the music that comes from the soul--yes, I said 'soul'-- and fires the words in ways letter-writing most often does not. Paint in colors you see only when going deep inside yourself- they are not the normal palette. They are gifts of language in the same way that ballet is not the current dance craze; both have a place, but only one is art. Both poetry and ballet are things practiced in order to be perfected, and that is what makes them extraordinary --and I guess that's what I want to say most of all: poetry is not the monotonous ticking-off of events as they happen to us. Poetry is a series of connections--to symbols, to common fears and happiness--it is the tongue of humankind with mysterious strings, and it sings itself. It is indefinable, but it is universally recognizable when it is done well. No matter the style, whether rhymed or not, it is a higher language; maybe the one that threads together all those third eyes. It is a necklace of matchless beauty and you cannot say that, referring to scribblings in a little locked book that talks about what food you ate, and the color of your shoes, the name of the restaurant, and whether or not it was raining. The rain should come from the inside. And your soul should pinch, not just your shoes...and if you tell it just like that, it begins to approach what poetry does that makes it different. It is the experience told from every sense, all at the same time- to all the world. |
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