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?"