make poetry make sense again

 is all writing a form of storytelling...even poetry?

it isn't if the poem rails against the evils of social injustice, laden with an asbestos-like toxicity that clings to one's soul after interacting with the poem.

it isn't if the structure overpowers the rationality, leaving us floating in a fetid pool of word excrement.

it isn't if the meaning meanders around in our craniums until it leaks out somewhere unsettled.

poetry has meaning. if it doesn't, it is not poetry. it is something else. it is structural ambiguity. it is semantic nonsense. it could even be soundscript.

but it isn't poetry. it is presumptuous, mindless drivel.

make poetry make sense again.

 

 

the college poet

straight-jacket words on a page

is formulaic diarrhea,

walking blindly inside structure

profits no man, no woman

no poetic rhythm

no poetic reason

collegiate poetry.

A Moment of Disaster

 Here is a piece of poetic fiction within my WIP, my new book- a moment of disaster:

Out back of Back Fork, at the Cogar Cottage, Timmy waited for the plumber. He sat on the front porch, drinking a sweet tea.

As he stepped inside to check the time...he heard a gushing whoosh.

He tried to open the back door, but a chaotic wave crashed through the walls...splintering pine, hemlock, and hardwood-thrown matchsticks...ice chunks, water, debris busting boards...the man with a wad of bills in his pocket thrown up against studs...the white-whirl sweeping him out to the street, chucked like a limp doll against a fence, where he settled, broken and bleeding...

How would you like to be remembered?

There's a scene in So, I Married An Axe Murderer, where Mike Myers, in character, describes a distasteful girlfriend as "she smelled like soup." He rejects her based on a single characteristic that overpowers the senses and makes her odious in the audience's minds.

Such a description dismisses such characters, confines them to "the fragmentary." 

I would not wish this on any of my readers. It may suffice to call one "thin as a pencil at 20 paces" with additional details to make one create a living vision within the movie in one's head. One can build on said "pencil in the wind" whenever the character is interacting with another. Another character may reveal other traits..."she made me think of Aunt Martha, the waif of a creature that looked like she'd gone through her own private Auschwitz." 

Anything less than the components needed to create that figure in your mind, and with that figure you've pictured, move through a series of events, either physical or emotional, does not do the reader justice. It is not fair to the contemporary reader, who may or may not have the same imagination of a well-read 19th century schoolteacher.

Mike Myers' line works because she is in a list of failed ex-girlfriends. That is the only time it should work- if we, as authors, do not want to torture our readers with more insight and then drop her from any other mention within the story.

My goal is to create the clearest image in your head as you read. It may linger like the taste of an expensive wine. It may not sharpen until you're read three or more sentences of descriptive characteristics of that person. But you should be able to envision that story in your head from my additional descriptive words, including those that create a gentle or harsh image because of the words used. 

Do you enjoy reading that helps you create such images as you read? Is it taxing when you are left with two or three words to describe a character? 

I would not like to be referred to as "the guy with garlic breath" if the only interaction with the character the readers had of me was in an Italian restaurant eating garlic bread. And then, every time I was introduced in another scene, it is my garlic breath that you remember. I never move on from that, and every line of dialogue comes "from that guy with garlic breath." Even after I am in bed dreaming about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Even after I have met the love of my life within the story, and she is described in various ways while the audience remembers me for my garlic breath. That is a failure of storytelling. As an author, I am trying to bridge the gap, to add more paint to the picture, so you, as the reader, can enjoy the story from start through the finish...not confuse you with not enough information.