poetically challenged

In a recent post, I talked about my friend’s newly opened online lit mag, Sloth Jockey.  The site is under way now, and is shaping up very nicely.

I noticed some poetry prompts over at Writing Forward.

Things are finally starting to go well, and I’ve had a few works published recently (or soon to come out).  The total has come to 20 poems accepted in the past 2 years — right about what I was aiming for.  

current issue

This was originally posted at my old blog sometime last year. I am transferring most of that content over to my newer blogs now.

 

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In my previous blog, I talked some about writing to a specific form as a way of getting the creative juices flowing. But the use of forms, as Lewis Turco discusses in his The Book of Forms, can also be a nice way to experiment with new ways of approaching poetry.

In his book, Turco discusses, in considering the elements of poetry, modes of writing, levels of poetry, and prosody (an organizing/structuring principle for poetry). One of the topics he discusses, and which interests me a great deal, is parenthetical prosody. He uses, to start off the section, e. e. cummings’ poem “l(a.” It is a neatly packaged little poem which experiments with the interaction of the word loneliness with the phrase a leaf falls. It is a poem that turns out to have a visual effect that nicely accompanies the interaction of the ideas of autumn and loneliness. There’s actually a whole lot that can be unpacked from this poem, though it is only made up of those 4 words.

Turco also introduces, in his section on parenthetical prosody, a poem I was not familiar with before reading about it here. He writes of Vito Hannibal Acconci’s poem “Re.” I was very taken with the poem upon reading it. I also loved Turco’s observation:

People who see ths poem for the first time are baffled by it. But the poem says visually, as well as in so many words, that “only about one-third of what one has to say can be communicated to others.” This poem, however, is a paradox because it expresses this theme completely, which contradicts the theme! The last two lines are, in fact, explicit: “I do not say all / all I say.” Acconci invented a formthat does exactly what he wanted it to do.

All of Turco’s discussion of parenthetical prosody brought to mind one of my favourite poems by one of my 3 favourite poets, Edwin Morgan’s Message Clear. I have been a big fan of Morgan for some time, and absolutely fell in love with this poem when I came across it some 6-7 years ago. While it is not, technically, based on parenthetical prosody, it uses a similar idea. It finds within the words themselves, by breaking them up into their parts, a way to express something related to, yet different (greater?) than, its original form. It is a very clever device, whichever precise form is used.

I’ve fiddled around some with various forms that are based on this same basic approach. Of course, some experiments have been more successful than others, but it has proven to be a very fun method to work through. I’ve enjoyed it a great deal because it invites the poet to find inspiration in the words themselves. In this instance, at least, it has seemed to me that the toying about with mechanics can actually be a source of inspiration. That (alongside it being fun) is hard to beat.

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Poetry Magazine Publishers Database

 

Have you ever seen poetry written by the really poetically challenged? No. Well, let me introduce you to my other poetry sites then…

First, there’s lightverse, the blog I keep over at xanga. It’s made up of light rhymes, all put together in a very short time (no more than 5 minutes per post).

Then there’s doggerelindeed, over at blogspot. It’s the same idea as lightverse, and is really absolute doggerel. If you aren’t sure what doggerel is, here’s a description/definition.

My acrostics are put together along the same principle, a few minutes per post. But, instead of rhymes, each post is an acrostic.

If you’d like to read work that is truly poetically challenged, you can pop into those sites.

When I was a teenager, I was not a drug user. Many of my friends, however, were. Including my best friend. She was, in fact, a dealer. She eventually came to me for help sobering up, feeling her life was pretty much in shambles as a result of the drugs she’d been involved with over the years.

And she wasn’t the only one. I was surrounded by friends who used drugs, and yet who regretted it. As an adult, I see less of it amongst my friends, but my uncle recently shared with me a journal he’d written through a stage of depression. He’d been a heavy drug user in his teenage years, and even now when he is in his 50’s, it has come back to haunt him with some very difficult complications.

All of this contact I’ve had with addicts has been a source of inspiration for some of my poetry. It has felt, in my life, that I’ve struggled through addictions, even though the pills were not in my mouth nore the needle in my own arm. What I found, though, is that addiction doesn’t only affect the addict, but everyone around the addict. I suppose that is why there are a number of literary magazines around focuses specifically on the issue of addiction, such as R.KV.R.Y Literary Journal. The writing of addiction seems to have a voice all its own.

My best friend never checked into an adolescent treatment program. In fact, there weren’t very many good facilities available for her back in those days. Instead, she had to rely on another teenager who was lost and frightened by it all, just as she was. I only wish we’d had access to the professional medical staff that is available in good programs today, such as the program at Echo Malibu. It is a good work, and one I commend. It is because of places like this that the writing of addiction often includes victorious voices, and not just dark and discouraging texts that end in hopelessness. The victory over addiction brought about through such places is an inspiration to all who hear its sound.

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This has been a sponsored post

I’ve recently been tasting just a bit of success in getting some work published. I’ve got about 15 poems in various print and online anthologies, along with essays here and there. While I count this all only as a very small start, I am pleased that it is a beginning of sorts, all the same.

I was thinking about some of the resources that have helped me get to this point in my writing, and thought I might should give some pointers to them here:

There are several books I have used for some time and still use on an almost daily basis. The most important is The Poet’s Market, with its extensive list of possibilities for publication. I’ve also enjoyed The Book of Forms, though (or perhaps because) it is a more structured approach than I often take to my writing. Books like poemcrazy and The Poetry Home Repair Manual have also been very helpful (and also fun!).

The online courses at Writers Online, offered by Inspired Author are likewise very useful.

At firstwriter.com, there is a good database for poetry contests, and another for magazine publishers. From the main page, there are also resources for writers of other genres.

I’m not much of a fiction writer, but if you are, you might want to check out one more resource: Enspiren Press now has a call for submissions. It might be a great place for you to get a foot in the door and get your career off the ground.

I’ve written before about my attempts to experiment with forms and structures in my writing process. Recently, I’ve begun an experiment that might be a little closer to my friend’s normal writing process than to my own. I’ve got a rather elaborate structure in my mind to which I want to fit a particular idea that I’ve been toying with.

What I am finding is that writing in this way slows the process down tremendously. This form I am currently working with is much more elaborate, and the poem is longer, than what I usually do. That is slowing me down, and that is a good thing. I am forced to think, this way, more carefully about exactly how I want to say what I want to say, and how to fit it effectively into the formation.

This is eye-opening to me, showing that there is so much more to it than merely being clever with words. There’s the equally important side of it, that of being disciplined with words.

I have a friend who is a very accomplished poet, having won awards in both Chinese and English poetry. He has told me before that for him, the structure of the poem comes first, and that dovetails with an idea/concept; and only later do the words begin to formulate.

That is very different from my own writing process. For me, it is often the idea that comes first, or snippets of phrases and words. Sometimes I even intentionally do things to make the poetry grow out of the words, like this or this.