Poetry, as well as living generally, is a kind of terra-forming, word creation and world creation, even when it is in the form of archiving, even flarf. They are acts of pushing neuroplasticity or letting it harden. As Steve Jobs said in his poke the world said, “everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build things that other people can use […] however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways.”
I’ve been looking at poetic form and the lives that form the form. Is there an index of prevalent form of poet and outline of cause of death? Do sestina fans have better or worse mortality rates than balladeers or free versers. What about outcomes in life pattern? Does the person end up drunk and having alienated everyone around them? Do they end up in a medicated tailspin that never rallies? Do they live quiet “successful” lives of depression behind false masks of cheer? Or are they living lives I’d want to emulate of openness, good will, being a friend to self, reconciling problems, engaged and energetic, matured among all the usual struggles life throws?
I look for people who allow themselves to vary rather than caricature themselves into one small corner of perception, reflection and expression. One must be able to move. If I demand the same old, I aid the person in crushing their own spirit into a too small of box. Some will want the privacy afforded by the one-channel public persona, but I’m not sure I get it.
I’m trying to get the general picture, which makes for a lot of data. I speak in vague generalities by times, impressionistically. As one of my favorite sayings go, I’m going to speak loosely and you need to listen loosely.
In listening to two readers some weeks ago one spoke in monotone. I couldn’t hear. The inflection curve was deadpan you might say. The other erred on the other side being constantly theatrical with inflections all over the place and gave the impression of patronizing children in that odd cadence people get around kittens except it went on regardless of tone of subject of poem for what seemed like hours but was probably 15or 20 minutes. To vary is natural. (Poetry’s skin is leather goods with natural variations?)
I try to keep all the 5 tastes on the plate at once, switch among them. Part of this is fear-driven because I think I can’t afford the luxury of dwelling in any direction or I won’t be able to get back. Having a monolithic experience is to be in the vulnerability of illusion. Or is a manifestation of my not feeling secure enough to accept being where ever I am, always needing one foot somewhere else? Some regions of the universe are uneven, spotty, with only one prevailing feeling. By randomness there will be clustering. By denying the clusters and needing to break them up I am not accepting what is. I don’t allow that; it takes trust in the world to do something entirely, feel something completely, say something in full. I am at least 10% skeptical of all things, never fully believing. That holds me back.
What I write and how I live inform each other. I consciously use poetry as a drug to counter myself. When I am chaotic, I go to haiku. If I’m feeling mentally blocked, I open up again with non-linear visual or absurd poetry. If I’m running short on beauty, I seek out grace. If life is dully smooth, I can add a little dark humour to sense.
I’m trying to learn the art of minimalism morsels, but at the same time allowing range of large canvas of complexity and non-linear. I check and balance myself. Perhaps check in the hockey sense and balance in the teeter on skate sense.
It’s a regular frustration to me that things I knock off the cuff when most depressions gets the best feedback. The confused rambles dazzle. People says they like how it feels. A buzz of emotion comes thru I suppose. That which I find valuable I have worked on longest, and probably overcooked. The value was the process, the working the language tools and being worked by them and the thinking thru. Which doesn’t make good poetry or guarantee bad poetry. Both it and the oblique blurts have their uses. Perhaps they balance each other out.
Reading people who killed themselves or lived destructive lives suggests that this is no one I’d want to emulate or attend to in life form or poetic form. Can the form backform the person? If one trains oneself to order, does neuroplasticity adapt? Writing is said to be generative and transformative. Since high school I was coached to let loose, do free form poetry, be liberated. Poetry workshops sometimes go in the head-dump, confession is cure model for personal growth. What if personal growth can also be achieved thru order? What if the person must grow regardless of conditions and if an environment of anything goes, anything is poetry or in an environment where there is a conscious effort to be accountable for making a better world and better life choices by carefully examining and attending to details of language to form a better person thru attention, meditation?
You can write about something or you can write how. I’m more interested in the underlying premise of the poem than the main content, more interested in the how than the what. The whats are a small set of universals. The how combos are the infinite diversity.
Your attitudes extrude out of anything. Walk down the street. What you attend to are shadows moving in grace or tumbleweeds of chip bags. Same street. Whether you write with conventional syntax or not, use words or part letterforms, prose blocks or scatter of letters, use all poetic device or eschew as many as possible, write from your life experience or curate randomalia of text around you, your bias isn’t shakeable.
Some people seem to think that only telling the true story of how they perceived it really happened in one split second of judgement, contained in lyrical form is the only way to truth of self-expression. And value self-expression as a high value. What if the value is for community, collective? What stories of others is worth paying attention to and bringing forward with our species?
It is all about containment and transcription of the right details. As opposed to the wrong details. It’s a binary state where a poem can be made right with effort in only one correct way. It might be due to the parable of the sculpture who finds the form predestined and hidden within any chunk of stone’s grain and crystal. There is an overlap between that clench of mind and those who fear of sharing ideas because other people will steal them and profit from their rightful copyright. And those who take as cardinal rule: no appropriation of voices.
That presumes there is a one voice. It is a notion of essentialism as well. Again that ticky tacky box for identity.
Joseph Harker reflected, “I feel like I’ve plateau’d in a lot of ways poetically: I think I need to both challenge myself more, and be more community-oriented (because you can only develop yourself so far in a relative vacuum).”
Part of that movement to social elements of poetry is seeing that poetry is not some isolated thing out there. Art as sealed, done by Great People. It is a model that assumes people ascend to a skill. Of course as people diligently try and fail and try, learning usually happens and skills improve but.
Even if the aim of poetry is not a practical propaganda, or an intentional expression of one meaning to a particular audience, it is a process and product and process inside a not so closed loop of information. It is a reaction against or movement towards and around what we’ve perceived in direct experience, expectations, models, etc.
Prompts that say write to emulate a form can chip one’s clasp off of writing about something and instead looking at what embedded assumptions are expressed or denied how.
I tussle with the idea of balance of mind, heart and verbal muscle in a poem. Sometimes they don’t have to balance. There doesn’t have to be a sense intended. Maybe the unconscious is driving towards somewhere. Sometimes it is just tooling around. That doesn’t mean it should not get in for the ride, or that it is a waste for the driver or anyone else.
There seems a moral spin put on poetry to demand that is is either autobiographical or suppression/denial. It’s alternately frustrating and comical. Everyone want to be the hero who rescues which is based in a belief that the other is a lesser who needs help. Not enough damsels in distress in this world. Perhaps we can manufacture some if we ever get to the level of cloning. Now, there is something with a genuine set of moral implications.