 Poetry: January 16, 2008 Issue [#2181] |
  Poetry
This week: Edited by: Texas Belle  
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| There are so many beautiful forms of poetry that a poet with enough ink and paper could write a different form for every day of the year, I suppose. Like most, I enjoy trying my hand at the established forms but sometimes, when the moon is full and there’s a chill in the air I find myself wanting to try something new. Oh, not a new form but twist on an old form (we did this with a sestina in a previous newsletter) or combining elements in a way that no one has ever tried before. This newsletter will feature a complete new form that my evil twin sister Skippy dreamed up in one of my nightmares. No, no you haven’t stumbled into the horror newsletter just found a poet gone creatively wild. |
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The creative process is a wonderful thing. When allowed to follow unilaterally across the expanse of the mind it conjures an exciting mélange of threads. Sometimes the thread pulled doesn’t produce a finished product or maybe the product isn’t worthy of publishing but the exercise is well worth the uncertainty. I had such a moment a few months ago, no real explanation how it happened but the thought just pop into my head: what if you took a familiar quote and made a poem from it. The idea wasn’t just to incorporate the quote into the poem, write around the quote per se. Instead, disassemble the quote into components and use those components to construct the poem; sort of literary recycling.
The quote I chose, or the quote that chose me, was written by John Greenleaf Whittier. It’s a piece of a poem that most people have heard from time to time: "Of all the words of tongue and pen the saddest are ‘It might have been.’ “ I know it was oft times quoted to me and by me during various times in my life. Here is the product:
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Of all the words
We should have said
We did not
Deftly sidestepping emotion
Refusing to discern the obvious.
Of tongue and pen
Wielded with ironic precision
Crafting clever bon mons
Eyes refusing to see
What hearts knew.
The saddest are words unspoken
Except in amorphous realms
Each knowing but not wanting
Trusting but not venturing forth.
It might have been
So many things
Or nothing
Held tightly in hearts
Well protected.
I chose to use the segments of the quote as the first line of each stanza. By doing this I was "forced" to write outside the quote. In other words, not write another poem using that passage, or worse, a poem that explained the quote. The poet can certainly do that but my purpose was to construct something completely different. It reminds me of something an artist friend told me about one particular painting of his. It was a truly unusual piece because of the colors that were used. He told me that he painted the entire canvas in the ugliest color he could think of and then "painted himself out of the problem." I feel that's what I did with this "form," wrote my way out of a problem.
Continue to study and write all the established forms because that allows an understanding of poetic structure. However, don't forget to look beyond the established form, you might be surprised what you will find.
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A little this, a little that, but all poetry!
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| |  | Snow (E)
Poem I wrote after reflecting on a beautiful snow fall.
#1373394 by hellf1re |
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