Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Diatribe

Diatribe

Well today I got all my reviews written for this week’s Exploratory Writing Workshop lesson. My students are making a lot of progress and starting to get a visceral understanding of what a life changing event is, a Dramatic Premise and what constitutes a crisis rather than a hick-up in the road of life.

They are all good writers but how can someone really write a complex work without being on an intimate basis with these ideas and so many more that exist at the operational and strategic levels of good writing. We learn by doing and it isn’t enough to provide a good lesson….a student has to do the work for themselves before the light really comes on in the gut.

Something as basic as a central character is not someone a writer nominates but rather someone who emerges during the developmental process… I know! Most of the experts disagree and say their characters are galley slaves and there is nothing mysterious about where they come from but I disagree… There is a spiritual quality to writing that resonates in your heart, just like a catchy tune resonates in your awareness… Just like a line of poetry quivers in your soul, crying out with an unmistakable authenticity.

I wrote a free verse poem called “Diatribe.” It is a sensual prose piece so don’t read it if that’s not your cup of tea. There are some lines however; that I liked and I found that free verse captures the spirit of the physical experience in ways that prose will never approach. The more I write in the poetic media the more I am amazed at how the spiritual dimension can be captured in a written work. That to me is why Shakespeare’s dramas have such power to this day. He found using iambic pentameter that he could capture that spiritual essence weaving it into a tapestry that intermingled both the prose and lyrical threads and thereby retain the spiritual essence. It can be any poetic form and not exclusively one that Shakespeare, Kipling or Pindar used. I even see evidence of it in my most recent poem.