Poetry as Life

For as long as I've been writing creatively, I've considered myself a fiction man - my technique might need work, but for the most part I'm comfortable with getting a plot, characters, some semblance of themes, all down on a blank writing canvas. These were things I could think about easily, and the only question overwhelming questions between each story would be what perspective should it be told in, what voice should be speaking, etc. It's very simple to say, "this happened, then this happened, and the characters thought this of it, and then this happened." Fiction can also be a very safe place to work in - not everyone is expected to be a Joyce or a Melville, so long as you can put down a sentence with a fair amount of commas, apostrophes, and add a period at the end, you can say whatever you want to say.

Poetry has been different case with me, though. In my younger years (which feels ironic to say, considering I'm only 19, hardly my golden years really) I would dabble in it, but only with rhymes. I tried my hand at a few free verse poems but, to be honest, couldn't feel the poetry in it. I felt that the only thing that made those poems was the continued rhythm of those rhymes, having those beats fall to each expected end, and without that steady pulse it was just prose. I knew many had written free verse, well too in fact, but I couldn't write the beautiful images those poets could at least get down, I just hoped a clever enough rhyme would come to me in time - it never did, really.

I find rhymes have always been constrictive, though, of the essence of poetry, which is...well, the essence of whatever you're writing about. Poetry used to consist solely of those trademark rhymes, and what a tedious way life must have been in. Perhaps they reflect a nobler effort, of trying to describe the perfection of the world through the most musical aspects of language - and then Milton fucked it all up by aiming to illustrate chaos and Pandemonium. These rhymes still have their place in poetry; I have to say that because damn near everything has its place in poetry now!

With the advent of free verse, something interesting happened with poetry: it ceased to show just one perspective and one voice on the world. That's somewhat of a simplification, but it's true to an extent. No matter what style or images were used, the air a poet breathed could only be translated down onto paper if "air" or some other synonym happened to have a conjoining rhyme - there had to be a certain perfection in the language for the music to pour out. But the world is hardly so simple. There is indeed a perfection to its creation, a mystical sort of drama about it, where everything has its place in the infinite spectrum of cycles and chains, but there is also a chaos that reigns free, the blind Chance that has the ultimate say in the writing of fate. Not only that, but beneath the simple, solid surfaces that we touch everyday are a teeming mass of wildly animated atoms, leaving one to wonder just how the ties of creation manage to hold together amidst all the hectic motion.

This is where free verse comes in: free verse is freely able to convey an infinite amount of aspects when describing something, simply because it is not bound by any convention. Language itself need not follow its own rules. When it comes to the written word, it is the closest to coming at the essence of life itself, perhaps only because the free verse poet has choice: he may put down a simple image in simple words and let it stand on its own, or he can fill it with metaphors and similes and various other literary tricks, or perhaps he sees that this image evokes far too many emotions and thoughts to honestly convey it all in the confines of syntax and sentence progression, and he puts scores of words down on the page with only the organization of a feeling in order to get at the pure, unbridled chaos of it all. Words are spelled wrong, and entire stanzas go by without a single preposition or piece of punctuation, or maybe not even a single noun or adjective, just verb after verb after verb until, all put together, they seem to spell something that can't even be defined by the small title of the piece. This propensity for chaos is what gives poetry its true power - one need not use it, but the option is always a must for the artist. It is always more rewarding to paint a straight line knowing that it is a choice that one does that instead of flinging paint against the wall.

Each poem, then, is a transcription of the way the poet views the world. Sometimes I am tempted to simply forgo punctuation, for what place does it have in life? But then, that is just me, and not even me all the time - I still write much poetry in simple, conventional terms, often just getting a bare image down and hoping it means something. Poetry should never be constricted to simply the comfortable form of writing one has grown accustomed to, or what one thinks is expected. Perhaps every poet, on conceiving a new piece, should close his eyes, and wonder to himself: "these lines I want to write, will they be meticulously crafted and plotted, using the finest of brushes and details? Or shall I embrace the abstract in the hopes of attempting at some unbridled emotion?"

Her Walking Somewhere Away

Her Walking Somewhere Away
by Matthew Stalbaum

i’ve a frail body and a
       Strong Love, it beats
against the walls of my heart and i am wracked by
       the violence of its passion, it is not a weak emotion,
no, i am the weaker of the two, it knows that after this body crumbles, it will
       beat on in my skeleton and my bones will clack and clatter madly as though
ravaged by a storm

       the two fight sometimes,
my body and
       my Love, they clash (
                                              in another place you
                                                    smile, but nothing--
                                                            dies, no thing dies)
the blows are very hard, the walls of
       my heart lie broken in dust
blood pours out in pools around my knees and hands but
       it does not relent, cannot,
does not know how

                           --i cough up the stale wine on my breath)

my body breaks, and
       my love stands over it
like king kong, while i, consumed by pain,
       make a feeble smile and
pull my love close, like
       a boxer, and it struggles and cries and the
fists crash endlessly and

               (i smile -- didn’t you
                 too? smile? a Smile!


        (somewhere in the haze i can no longer tell where or when or what
        (i laugh and you laugh and there is a sun to stare into--
it does not rain, there is only heat,
liquor on my breath steams away
        (--in the haze your face g-glows, like suns and moons and
        (c-cigarettes, then fades and fades and f-fades and fades and fades---
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So, funny story behind posting this poem, I originally tried posting it to facebook
but it auto-aligned to the left, so I got angry and created this blog, tried posting
again...auto-align to the left again!  It probably should have just occurred to me to
look up how to keep my indentations somewhere on google, but oh well, I already made
this blog so I might as well keep it. 

I've never written anything this unconventional in terms of format, so comments and
criticisms would be greatly appreciated to anyone who happens to stumble onto this
blog and read this, tell me it sucks, that it's the worst thing written since the
screenplay of Troll 2, just tell me something!

First Post: Bad Love Poetry

Oh joys, a blog! The internet desperately doesn't need another one, but it is undeniably convenient for an aspiring writer to have a place on the general internet (that isn't facebook or myspace) to post his stuff. Besides, I tried to post an e.e. cummings type poem on facebook the other night and it just didn't work, so I'm changing venues for my poetry/fiction/random ramblings.

But before I post that poem, I want to talk about the name of this blog, because it sounds stereotypically self-depricatory, to title this "badlovepoet" and be a writer - I've written bad love poetry, with trite rhymes and everything (oh, high school and the abysmal drama! Words like "abysmal" are leftover from those melodramatic days), and even if my poetry these days isn't good, I'd like to think it's at least a step above painfully bad. I keep any angst I might still have to myself, no one needs to be tortured with that again...God, just thinking about it makes me feel bad for the people I subjected that to!

But that's not what this blog is about. "badlovepoet" comes from something I heard a published poet say at a creative writing reading once (her name escapes me, I really should have written it down). She was introducing a love poem she had written, so she said, "I don't think there's such thing as a good love poem, but I took my hand at it anyway." This was during freshman year of college, and the only poetry I had written had been the angst-ridden verses I scribbled during high school, mostly filled with obvious rhymes and images, so I agreed based on my own experience, and soon after that I would just forsake writing poetry altoghether.

After being introduced to e.e. cummings this recent Sophomore year, I started writing poetry again, only free verse this time around, and I think I've been making some progress - I won 2nd place in a poetry contest anyways, which got me $100, so I've already accomplished more with poetry than I ever thought I would. Mostly I write about love and life, just because those are the things I think about the most often. I try to involve the thematic and formal complexities that cummings is known for, but that's only part of the reason why I write love poetry, and the boring part, frankly.

Honestly, the world is probably better off without another pretentious poet passing off his love as something the world should care about. I do it simply because - well, it's love, reason hardly ever factors into love. Even knowing everything will come out terribly, we'll take a shot at a relationship if only for the prospect of that momentary embrace when the world falls away and there is only the comfort of loving someone. Sometimes a moment is precious for its own sake - a kiss can be a kiss and not some profound metaphor.

I write love poetry because I like to, because I like love, and because I enjoy thinking of love. Even if it's poorly written, it's what I feel, and I can't change that. Even knowing a love poem will be bad, I have to try and write it - who knows, maybe something will come of it after all. I'm sure that most love poetry is almost sickeningly terrible, but so long as we feel it we'll try to get it down on paper, if only to give someone an impression of the immense emotions we feel; and if we fail in our efforts? Well, like love, you pick yourself up and try again.