I'm posting this flyer to call your attention to a fabulous and free workshop next month. I will be joining Jim Vires and Genie Rayner of Branch Hill Publishing, along with Melissa Stevens and Leona Charlie Holman to conduct five mini-sessions for writers. The topics to be covered include electronic publishing, editing for publishing, book cover art, writing metered poetry, and plot development. If you are near East Tennessee on October 8th, you are invited to join us!
I don't like it. I have been watching this happen over the last twenty-five years, although it has been going on for much longer. The last ten years, because of the Internet, the speed at which this has been occurring has seemingly quadrupled. I'm talking about the disconnect poets have with writing properly metered verse. There is no great secret, most poets write free verse poetry. Most of what I write is free verse. Writing free verse poetry is less "constipating" to creativity. That said, what I find amazing is the amount of rhyming poetry posted all over the Internet with no form or meter. Is this wrong? No, it's not. People are free to write in whatever manner they please. What is disturbing to me is the sheer lack of any metered poetry. Is there cause for concern over this absence of metered verse?
As I prepared to write this post, I made a survey of several popular poetry sites: Writerscafe.org, HelloPoetry.com, and Poetrypoem.com. I began to search out rhyming poems with reckless abandon, disregarding the author and focusing on the content of the poems. And what did I find? Is there a common denominator among all of these submissions? Why, yes there is. In my scansion of the poetry, I found no single rhyming poem on any of the three sites correctly metered. Zero. Now, I'm sure there are hundreds of examples posted that are in meter, but on this day, the poetry I reviewed was all irregular meter - trochees and iambs tossed about like magnetic poetry words falling off a fridge during an earthquake. I am troubled by this. A few years ago, I audited a creative writing class, upper-level mind you, at a local university. The professor was well published and the students had all the earmarks of aspiring writers...right down to the Starbucks coffee cups and the eccentric, happy-go-lucky creative mindsets with which we often pride ourselves. Most of these kids were tremendous writers. Gifted even. The writing these students put down was admirable at a minimum and intimidating at its best. As the semester wore on, we began the poetry module. We were lectured. We visited with Sylvia Plath. We visited with Margaret Atwood. We enjoyed a cup of joe while we gloried in the work of Langston Hughes. We touched on Frost and only cast a glance toward Shakespeare. Then we started the process of writing poetry, deploying various poetic devices, and critiquing our poems. Minus from this classroom learning was any discussion regarding poetic meter. I had to say something. We couldn't just assume these students understood meter, could we? So, onward I bore the standard for the masters and inquired why we are not covering rhyming poetry in greater depth. I was met with a blank stare. To paraphrase, the response went a little like this: "You would never place in a poetry contest with a rhyming poem. Most literary magazines trash those submissions as soon as they come in. I don't understand meter myself..." He was right and I knew it to be fact. And this is what really troubles me. It is not that ninety-nine percent of poets don't know a dactyl from a spondee. It is believing that we have an obligation to know and to understand the fullness of the art form. We have a responsibility to the art itself to teach it in whole and not in part. Sadly, when college level instruction in creative writing fails to include instruction in scansion, meter, rhyming poetry and its forms, then we fail to teach a respect for the masters and the craft. Even though I am certain there may be a lot of secondary and post-secondary instructors out there teaching these principles, the evidence is certainly not showing up in the work that is posted on the Internet or in many, many published and self-published chapbooks and collections. Truth is, eighty percent of the stuff I write is free verse. I will also tell you that I have never had a contest winning (or even placing for that matter) rhyming submission, while many of my free verse poems have placed or won in numerous contests. The fact that many literary magazines do not view rhyming poetry as serious material either underscores the fact they cannot scansion poetry themselves, or, they have abandoned form poems altogether - resigning them to an out-of-date style no serious writer would engage. I would suggest to you we have created a writing vacuum...a downward spiral where history, art, and respect for form poetry has been sucked out of society. With each generation, we move further and further beyond the roots of classical writing. Are we missing something here writing community? I can't help but feel we are going awry by not engaging the totality of poetry. What say you? I just finished this piece this morning for an upcoming open mic sponsored by the Night Writer's Guild. This event will be held on Monday, August 15th at the Books-A-Million store in Kingsport, Tennessee. This prose employs the metaphor of an artisan as compared to a homeless person. Also, observe the parallel between redemption and truth.
Starving Artist It’s hot, maybe 90 degrees or so and I am waiting for my wife and the parking lot we’re sitting in is overflowing with cars and shoppers, cars and shoppers, everywhere cars and shoppers and they move back and forth to the stores like a high and low tide. And with this next wave I am drowning in boredom and sweat. I catch a glimpse of some human form that is flitting and floating, appearing and disappearing, a dozen rows down from me. I strain for a clearer view but the movement lost between the cars, the glaring sunlight from windshields, and an ethereal heat mirage, in which all things seem to melt together. Then, with clarity that startles me, the vaporous form finally manifests itself. A woman, or girl, I cannot be sure, but I know because the white dress she is wearing coils around her body with her every turn. She is a good bit away from me yet, but still moving in my direction – pirouetting between cars, turning and speaking a few words to this shopper then the next, but always remaining in this constant state of fluid motion. I am intrigued with her. As she nears, she approaches a Benz and I can see the driver shaking his head and waving a hand in the air – the universal sign synonymous with “you’re bothering me.” She continues this dance and I vacillate between amusement with the art form of this parking lot ballerina and a worry - knowing that in a few moments she is going to see me and I cannot hide. In a few minutes, I will be confronted with truth – the knowledge of who, what, and why. Even at this distance, her appearance is quite stunning. Thin, and as she spins around her blonde hair alternates shoulders on which it rests. For a moment, I am puzzled. And then I understand. She’s bumming money - a con artist, I say out loud, shattering the quiet of the car. I am almost paralyzed by my thoughts. And as she draws near, I can see how the distance between us has been a liar. She must be twenty-four or twenty-five but her mottled face doubles that. The white dress she is wearing is tattered at the hem and soiled in an array of brown and yellow hues. The hair I admired just moments earlier now shows itself to be matted and dingy in color. Her movement slows only momentarily as she catches me looking her over. We make eye contact and she floats towards me. I cannot resist. I roll down my window. She kneels before my door, both hands gripping its surface as if she is trying to see past the edge of the universe and leaning just at the lip of the void. In this asphalt Gethsemane, the sweat beads across her furrowed brow and when she opens her mouth an eternity passes before me while I’m waiting for her words to drift through me like a holy breeze. Her teeth are crooked and stained. Her blue eyes give every absolute indication of desperation and in this infinite stillness I wonder. I wonder how she arrived at this place in her life; I wonder where she goes at night; I wonder what she eats; I wonder if anyone misses her; I wonder if she has kids, and I wonder if she has ever known the exhilaration of finding a three dollar blouse - just her size, just her color - hanging in the wrong place on the rack. As words begin to form and flow across her cracked lips, hope spills from her eyes and fills the car. The same hope Michelangelo held as the paint flowed from his brush tip and covered a ceiling while he suffers the pain of lying on a plank for hours on end, the same hope Beethoven must have felt as the vibrations from the chords he struck pierced his deaf ears, the same hope that painted the ground crimson below a tree where hangs the Christ. And I realize the only thing that separates my life from hers isn’t an education. It isn’t an ability to conjure extended metaphors and write pages of symbolic prose, and it certainly isn’t who I know or where I’ve been or what I’ve done. It is my own misguided hope. She hopes for something to eat; I hope to get home in time for an early supper. She hopes she doesn’t get raped when she falls asleep behind a dumpster tonight; I hope my wife hadn’t forgotten to wash the bed linen. She hopes to score a pair of shoes from Goodwill for free; I hope I can find a pair of wingtips that are more cordovan than brown this time. And this fear that grips me tells me the real truth about this young woman: the real difference between us, the one thing that keeps me on the inside this air conditioned Volvo and not leaning beside its window in the heat looking for my next meal is the quickened cruel fate of my world hurdling out of control. Then this seraph speaks. And…all I can hear while reaching for my wallet is Master Beethoven softly humming the measures of “Ode to Joy” <Hum five measures of “Ode to Joy”> She offers me God’s blessing as she again pirouettes away and I am convinced her angelic presence is leaving me only to revel in my own fate – to consider how it should come to pass that I might stand before some congregation of souls, spewing lines of poetry prompted by my measure of fear and hope. |
AuthorSeeking the truth around us; penning evidence in hues of emotion. Archives |