Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Every once in a while I hit the verse button and post some text with a higher than average percentage of enter key presses. I call these poems, because they resemble poems, although I honestly don’t know what it means to “resemble” a poem.

Poetry is a wonderful art form because of the freedom it offers, and the potential it has to strike its audience with more power than common language. There is good poetry and bad poetry, but the line between them is broad and nebulous: most poetry strives to break through to the more favorable side, without accumulating the unfortunate weight that would drag it in the other direction.

A good poem displays an economy of words, and parts of words; not in the sense of using as few as possible, but in using as many as is necessary to assemble a satisfying or provocative line, phrase, thought, etc. Popular poetic forms exist to guide poets in that direction, while those who pursue free verse are attempting to discover that economy without a map and compass. At least, I think that’s what they are doing. I like forms myself.

When I see a poem and I decide that it’s a bad poem, it’s usually because it is either cumbersome and poorly constructed, or it does not seem to be saying anything that speaks to real human feeling. We could be here all day debating what exactly the meaning of that is, but I think we know what kills it: insincerity, cliché, and confusion.

What I particularly like about poetry, however, is the way that writing it feels like solving a puzzle. When I write a poem, I am attempting to express an idea, or discover an idea, in a way that is rhythmically appropriate and takes advantage of the aesthetically pleasing properties of language. Whether hunting for the word that has the right meaning in the right pattern of syllables, or devising a whole new pattern to accommodate the word that won’t fit the original plan, my poetry is an investigation into the shape and meaning of words, and an opportunity to learn more about my own thoughts and feelings along the way.

Writing a good poem is not very different from writing a good sentence. The essential difference is that good sentences are typically governed by certain grammatical ideals and the necessity of communicating a complete idea within their boundaries, while poems are freer to approach grammar and meaning with greater ambiguity. However, a sentence almost always benefits from poetical thought, with regard to the aesthetics of sound and the balance of rhythm.

Yesterday I posted a poem, or three poems (depending on how you look at it), based on an idea that I had over the last weekend: to depict a love affair from three places in time. The first part is a remembrance of lost love, an attempt to recapture the presence of some one who is gone and exorcise regrets. The second is a depiction of a single brief moment in the present, when love is realized and fully experienced. The third is an expression of the yearning that comes before the love affair has begun, even before the beloved has been met for the first time.

I drew on experiences from my own life in writing each part, and I gave each one a different structure to reflect the discontinuity of the three time frames. I also set them in the reverse of the expected chronology, so that the narrative arc of the whole did not become tragic, and instead emphasizes the fundamental similarity of longing for what is lost and for what has not yet been had. The middle part I made purposely short, to reflect how the present is experienced as an instant and not something to reflect upon at length. With these ideas in mind, it was all a matter of taking the skills and knowledge I have about how poems are put together and using them to serve those ideas.

Another reason that I wrote it in three parts is because I have an unfortunate level of anxiety about putting short, single poems up for consideration. I have nothing against short poems. I just have the terrible feeling that when I write a short one, a critic even harsher than myself will say “that can’t be all of it, there has to be more to it than that.” I wish I were confident enough to let two or three lines stand on their own when they can, but at the very least it encourages me to write more poetry.

I flatter myself that there are fun and interesting elements of craft to appreciate in yesterday’s post. I also flatter myself that the words are relatable for any person inclined toward romance, or love of any kind. I don’t know how good they are by the standards of anybody but myself, and I certainly see opportunities to criticize them by the standards I have outlined here, but they feel to me like authentic expressions of real human feeling. Since I am a human being, I have to assume they will feel that way to at least one other person.