"An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered."
-G.K Chesterton
I’ve taken up poetry lately and it has quickly become a favourite writing medium. This is a surprising turn since the poetry unit in English class was always a bit of a snooze for me. But here I am writing poetry and not feeling a bit self-conscious about it. I don’t have to worry about character development or plotting. I can splash wild emotion across stoicism. I can remain merely observational. I can be coy. I can be mercurial. I can change my mind.
Sometimes a poem tells the truth, or it only seems to. Often it lies out of the side of its mouth, as though it wonders just how much you’ll buy of what it is selling. Writing a poem can be a way of hiding in plain sight, or running naked and wild across a page. Some poetry is so dense it is written in a code only the author can understand. This variety makes it one of the most liberating forms of writing. I've found I love writing poetry that rhymes (I'm not ashamed of it.) and I enjoy reading it aloud; feeling the cadence of a juggernaut rhythm that builds and builds until it stops in a sudden thunderclap.
It is also freedom from the grind of querying in pursuit of publication. If you are a writer, you know that omnipresent pressure to publish can kill the creative impulse and make writing a nemesis to be bested instead of a companion in your solitude and a vocation worth pursuing. Poetry is writing for pure enjoyment and catharsis. No one imagines that poetry will pay the bills (unless, perhaps, you are Leonard Cohen, but even he has to set it to music). It allows you to write without pressure to be anything or do anything. Rediscovering it has been a consolation. You can just marry interesting words and ideas together as though they were born that way; making unique creations out of peculiar words and unorthodox grammar and not be bothered about anyone’s response to it.
For example
you can’t
watch time thickening
anymore
than you can
predict
your own body language
on a date
or
the events of
a hypnogogic dream
that seems
to
mean
something
More than any other form of writing, poetry is more like life and yet, nothing like it at all. A novel--though sporting crackling dialogue, vivid character development, shrewd plotting and thorough world-building-- is a tight highlight reel that (ideally) shows nothing of the winnowing process that is redrafting and editing. Actual conversation when transcribed is full of "um's", "you know's" and a lot of dangling thoughts. Life is filled with sentences that run ahead to nowhere, impossible interruptions; talking over your companion and zoning out because periodically your thoughts are more interesting than they are. Our brains--magisterial creations that they are--filter out the filler and deliver solid understanding and a coherent memory of what would have been one hell of a mess on the page. All of these competing signals and intentions can make for interesting lives, but you cannot write that way and expect any kind of coherence.
A character always needs a purpose for what they are doing or saying. This is true of acting as well, randomly strolling around the stage for no apparent reason is amateurish. People always have a reason for the moves they make. Maybe it is expelling nervous energy, maybe it is to lean against a more comfortable area of the kitchen counter. Writing scenes in which the characters have no apparent purpose is a dead giveaway of a greenhorn. Even using narration to advance the plot or reveal important details can quickly prove irritating. Because the reader is an active participant--a witness to the action--the narrator should only interrupt the flow if what they have to add is of total surprise to the reader. If the reader can surmise the character is sad, it is nothing short of tiresome to be told that he was. (One shouldn't assume sociopathy on the part of their readership…) So, writing in a realistic and comprehensible way takes a lot of work on the writer's part. First you have to invent something out of nothing. Then you can't just transcribe conversations as they really are. You have to filter and edit and be the brain and the memory without feeling smart enough for the task that your own brain performs subconsciously every day. You have to build stories layers at a time. Develop character. Create tension.
You have to write hard so that it reads easy.
But poetry isn't like that at all. A poem is the art of implication. She hints at the elements of a story, but keeps her secrets to herself. It is freedom and the ability to express the raw edges of emotion and thought without having to make every line comprehensible. It isn't an instruction manual that demonstrates how to move from one point to the next. It's a beauty thing that is free to soar or plummet.
That being said, what I have discovered about poems through writing them, is that they are more interesting when they have limitations. When there is a rhyming scheme or a structural confine, it makes for a more compelling poem. Stream of consciousness writing is only briefly of interest to the person who wrote it. A poem requires some rule or structure to create the truly delightful surprise of a brilliant turn of phrase. A rhyming scheme means that not any word will do--and herein lies the magic. The search for a word that fits the rule can take the poem somewhere the writer hasn't anticipated; because there are limitations, new avenues for creativity are opened wide. The very existence of the limitation provides greater freedom for creativity, even though on the surface it looks like less. Maybe that is why I never really appreciated the Poetry Unit in English class. The rules for sonnets, odes or whatever just seemed arbitrary and hard. I didn't know that they were the key to beauty.
How odd.
How contrary to our way of thinking to realize that it is the constraints placed on the medium that facilitate the production of an intricate and unique beauty. Human nature rebels at rules and yet we recognize the need for them in some cases. We want to drive on roads where everyone knows and obeys the law. Our very lives may depend on it. But what about other aspects of our lives? Our morality, our ethical code, the substance of our character? If our lives are poems and stories that God wants to write, it follows that the constraints He has created are the parameters of beauty, not the shackles of oppression. "Painting outside the lines" is a cliched anthem for freedom of expression, but if you don't know what you're doing, all you've done is stain the surface you're working on. What if we looked at the moral law God has given for us to write our lives with and saw the variables of creative impulse and the unique challenge presented to each one of us with every choice to find the right action that explodes the poem of our life with unequalled splendour. What if we looked at the constraints as that which facilitates our ability to be unique. It is the rule that causes the our creative minds to push past easy and ordinary and find the truly exceptional and astounding. Anyone can ignore the limitations. It takes artistry to follow them. Give ten artists the same constraints and equipment and you will find that they have none of them produced identical work. The limitation is only the framework on which each one-of-a-kind creation will hang.
But it is a lie as old as the Garden that God wants to take things from us, rather than knowing that He is the one who has given everything to us--Including the parameters of beauty.
A character always needs a purpose for what they are doing or saying. This is true of acting as well, randomly strolling around the stage for no apparent reason is amateurish. People always have a reason for the moves they make. Maybe it is expelling nervous energy, maybe it is to lean against a more comfortable area of the kitchen counter. Writing scenes in which the characters have no apparent purpose is a dead giveaway of a greenhorn. Even using narration to advance the plot or reveal important details can quickly prove irritating. Because the reader is an active participant--a witness to the action--the narrator should only interrupt the flow if what they have to add is of total surprise to the reader. If the reader can surmise the character is sad, it is nothing short of tiresome to be told that he was. (One shouldn't assume sociopathy on the part of their readership…) So, writing in a realistic and comprehensible way takes a lot of work on the writer's part. First you have to invent something out of nothing. Then you can't just transcribe conversations as they really are. You have to filter and edit and be the brain and the memory without feeling smart enough for the task that your own brain performs subconsciously every day. You have to build stories layers at a time. Develop character. Create tension.
You have to write hard so that it reads easy.
But poetry isn't like that at all. A poem is the art of implication. She hints at the elements of a story, but keeps her secrets to herself. It is freedom and the ability to express the raw edges of emotion and thought without having to make every line comprehensible. It isn't an instruction manual that demonstrates how to move from one point to the next. It's a beauty thing that is free to soar or plummet.
That being said, what I have discovered about poems through writing them, is that they are more interesting when they have limitations. When there is a rhyming scheme or a structural confine, it makes for a more compelling poem. Stream of consciousness writing is only briefly of interest to the person who wrote it. A poem requires some rule or structure to create the truly delightful surprise of a brilliant turn of phrase. A rhyming scheme means that not any word will do--and herein lies the magic. The search for a word that fits the rule can take the poem somewhere the writer hasn't anticipated; because there are limitations, new avenues for creativity are opened wide. The very existence of the limitation provides greater freedom for creativity, even though on the surface it looks like less. Maybe that is why I never really appreciated the Poetry Unit in English class. The rules for sonnets, odes or whatever just seemed arbitrary and hard. I didn't know that they were the key to beauty.
How odd.
How contrary to our way of thinking to realize that it is the constraints placed on the medium that facilitate the production of an intricate and unique beauty. Human nature rebels at rules and yet we recognize the need for them in some cases. We want to drive on roads where everyone knows and obeys the law. Our very lives may depend on it. But what about other aspects of our lives? Our morality, our ethical code, the substance of our character? If our lives are poems and stories that God wants to write, it follows that the constraints He has created are the parameters of beauty, not the shackles of oppression. "Painting outside the lines" is a cliched anthem for freedom of expression, but if you don't know what you're doing, all you've done is stain the surface you're working on. What if we looked at the moral law God has given for us to write our lives with and saw the variables of creative impulse and the unique challenge presented to each one of us with every choice to find the right action that explodes the poem of our life with unequalled splendour. What if we looked at the constraints as that which facilitates our ability to be unique. It is the rule that causes the our creative minds to push past easy and ordinary and find the truly exceptional and astounding. Anyone can ignore the limitations. It takes artistry to follow them. Give ten artists the same constraints and equipment and you will find that they have none of them produced identical work. The limitation is only the framework on which each one-of-a-kind creation will hang.
But it is a lie as old as the Garden that God wants to take things from us, rather than knowing that He is the one who has given everything to us--Including the parameters of beauty.
No comments:
Post a Comment