The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #59753 Message #956175
Posted By: Peter T.
20-May-03 - 10:29 AM
Thread Name: BS: What Constitutes Good Writing?
Subject: RE: BS: What Constitutes Good Writing?
"Day One. At sea." (repeat ad infinitum) (Two Years Strapped to the Pen).
Curious reversal, Kim. I couldn't write a song to save my soul, but poetry comes pretty easy (i.e. incredibly hard, but it makes sense doing it).
Poetry is like the shift from graphite to diamonds. It requires a lot of pressure (the pencil of the great poet is 100H), from the stanzaic form, or the need for a rhythm, or just the recalcitrance of words. There are poems that I have written that are absolutely perfect except for one word which will not come, and for which English does not provide. Drives you crazy. (Auden said poems are not finished, just abandoned).
That being the case, non-rhymed verse (actually the bulk of verse in humankind)is very, very hard to write, much harder than rhymed verse, which gives you a default system of pressure within which to work. Just putting down words does not "signify" anything. In non-rhymed verse you usually are trying to "foreground" something that is not usually paid attention to -- for instance in stance -- as soon as I split the word "instance" up it foregrounds the strangeness of the word's elements, which your eye passes over the first time around. A poet can do this with all elements of language (e.g. concrete poetry made up of punctuation marks). Doing that while making a larger statement is where you edge into good poetry, rather than just futzing around.
Ezra Pound was pretty good when he said that poetry is news that stays news.
yours, Peter T.