It has been three weeks since my last update, which is
overall unacceptable. I have quite a bit of content planned for the coming
weeks, so this most recent hiccup will not be repeated for some time. Or so I
hope.
In any case, today’s entry nods once again to the world of
creative writing. My friend and colleague over at TrainWrite posted a short
essay of mine several months ago that, though at the time I loved, I am now very
much not a fan of. I expect a similar self-critical slide related to my second
TrainWrite piece, which is a poem entitled “Hurricane.”
This post highlights form. Many poets write in a single
pattern with rhyme, stress, or number of syllables coordinating the entire
text. This works, and often results in exceptional poetry. Other poets don’t do
this. George Herbert was one who tried to spice things up by playing with form.
Perhaps his most famous example is “Easter Wings” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_poetry),
where the shape of the text is related to the message found in the words (the
stanzas look like wings…get it?).
Hurricane plays with form too, but not in the visual sense.
Take the first two stanzas, for example:
THE CHAMP IS HERE!
He’s boarding the Braintree train at Harvard,
Neglected dreadlocks hanging almost jaggedly.
Hallelujah
MADISON SQUARE GARDEN. 1963.
His voice is mammoth,
it pops from his lips.
Hallelujah
There are clearly three “sections” in each stanza. There’s
the part in all caps, two lines in normal font, then a line in italics. This
can be a little confusing at first, but, really, poetry was made to be read over
and over again. Anyone who understands the intricacies of this kind of text,
even one written by an amateur poet such as myself, after one pass, is
decidedly brilliant.
As you read through the poem, it becomes clear that the
lines in all caps are being spoken by the main character in the story, “The
Champ.” The middle two lines are from the narrator/bystander, and the last line
is a song that was stuck in the author’s head while this whole thing went down.
That last part may or may not be an easy one to figure out.
But that’s not really the point. What’s important to remember is that poetry,
like all art, is something that can be played with and molded to fit what you
think is best. Sure there are names for certain trends and techniques, like Herbert’s
poem which some people very inventively call “Shape Poetry,” but each work is
unique. Each work provides an opportunity to try something new. So what if it
confuses the reader. Maybe that just means you’re an especially gifted poet!
