 Poetry: February 21, 2018 Issue [#8772] |
  Poetry
This week: BE a Wordsmith! Edited by: Fyn  
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Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing - and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.~~Sylvia Plath
Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.~~Ernst Haas
If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.~~Robert Delaunay
People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.~~John C. Maxwell
Silence is better than unmeaning words.~~Pythagoras
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.~~Rudyard Kipling
We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.~~Winston Churchill
But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.~~Lord Byron
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Words, in and of themselves, are but a step; the magical combination of them that brings the reader smack into what they read are the stairs to being a wordsmith. This is what we, as poets, strive to achieve. I read a poem yesterday. It began, "I am sad/My father died./I sat in my chair/and cried and cried." Okay, that may well have been what the writer did.Not the first and by no means, the last/only person who has ever cried after losing someone. But that combination of words evokes absolutely nothing. Certainly no emotion, no feelings. We are left with a sense of 'okay, that was, um, sad.' Ish.
Grief can be an overwhelming emotion. It can knock you for a loop, it can devastate, and it can make your world come to a crashing halt. It can immobilize. The death leaves an unfillable hole and a sense of utter helplessness. Yet that poem conveyed nothing of this. More a statement of facts. Sad how? Sad, why? How did they sit? Curled in a ball or sprawled out? Cried how? Silent tears streaming? In gut-wrenching sobs? Til their eyes were swollen shut? Was the crying cathartic? Or did they feel like all they achieved was a horrendous headache. Was there an entire box of tissues wadded up on the floor? What? It was fifteen words that said so little. I hope it didn't describe the sum total of what the writer felt or thought. What did they think about while crying? Were they feeling abandoned and lonely? Were they rethinking moments of joy or other adventures they shared? What? The words gave me nothing. No emotion given, no description of the feelings, thus I felt nothing, I gleaned nothing. I might as well have looked at a slumped stick figure with a sad face. No, because even that brings more of a reaction.
“What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.” Anais Nin here describes far more of what a death would/could mean or better, what one takes away of having known and lost a life.
She speaks on why one writes: "We also write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely … When I don’t write, feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing." ~~('The New Woman', 1974)
The woman speaks and poetry flows out even if what she is writing is not poetry per se. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
This, this is why one writes! One should write because they, quite simply, must. One doesn't sit down and think, "I shall be a poet for the next forty-five minutes." One is. Or one isn't. A poet goes through their day in a haze of poetic reaction and action, seeing the world through a prismatic haze. A poet views what is around them as a poetic kaleidoscope of words that expand and contract, reforming into new combinations reflexive of what is around them, what is happening and their reactions to same.
A wordsmith searches out, delves into their psyche to find that right combination of thoughts, words, sounds to evoke a reaction, memory or shared sense of emotion. The poet, using a clawed quill, gouges deeply into the heart or mind and scribes out the raw, the uncompromising, the heart-stoppingly breathtaking. The reader reads the words and feels something. Emotions (together with shared experience, perhaps,) well up and thus feels their heart pinch or tears come to their eyes. There is the ability to bring forth honest reactions.
A poem dies when the reader has a null reaction.
A poet wants their poetry to give birth to a wellspring of emotions or memories. It needs to be a truth. And, it needs to do so in a way that communicate a reality that is visceral. The poet's words must illustrate the thought, the poetry's intent must be to use words as brush strokes to create a painting of thoughts and give them substance. It must be alive, living and breathing regardless if it is a reaction to a death, a recreation of an incredible sunset or fire-fueled anger at feelings of utter misery. One needs to play with words, sounds, imagery, meter, and rhyme as if it were on a piano where each combination of notes, chords, flats and sharps are a multitude of possible word combinations until the finished poem plays exactly what one heard in their mind.
Robert Frost said, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” He was fond of 'layered, gritty' thoughts and emotions. He struggled with it and constantly revised and edited his work, sometimes even still, long after a poem entered into to the canons of literature. "Capturing complex feelings in words without the support of music is a marvelous feat. Only the deftest poets do it well." Much as one 'practices' law or medicine, Robert Frost always believed that one 'practiced' writing -- no matter the level of public acclaim a poet might have achieved. He told me once when I was very young and he was very old that if I desired to be a poet, I'd best plan on practicing being one for the rest of my life, because each new poem was a challenge that must be overcome. There was only one way to do that, he told me, and that was to practice. Always. For the rest of my life. Until I was as old as he was. He added that he still did, every single day.
I've never forgotten his words. They are surely worth the remembering!
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Elfin Dragon-finally published  offers: from the first six months I was here at WDC it's difficult to choose a favorite poem. I was in dark times then and wrote several dark poems. Though I did have a few bright spots as well. So to balance out things I'll give you two. The one which, for me, seems to be the best of the lot and strikes a chord is one of the really dark poems I wrote | |  | Invalid Item
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. The other is a lighter more inspirational poem which everyone here at WDC seemed to like that year which is. | | | Invalid Item
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Monty  says:You were smart to have hard copy of your poetry. I lost a hard drive with nearly 1000 poems. I don't remember what I wrote unless I find a scribble that started one and I can write something close again. Your News Letter was very interesting.
Ren the Klutz!  writes: Thanks for the highlights, Fyn. I love this idea and I have many journals filled with poems and half poems and ideas that I have long forgotten. I even make notes to myself so that when I am posthumously published people will know exactly what I was writing about instead of guessing. lol I bet you have way more stashed stuff than I do, however. 
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