Condensed Poetry
January 2nd 2009 17:46
So, recently I put together a chapbook of 14 of my poems. At the time, I liked all of them pretty well; I mean, I always know that no poem is ever perfect and it can always be altered, but I thought my alterations had been pretty thorough. However, soon after publishing the chapbook (I only made 12 copies via the copy center at my college, and distributed most of them as Christmas gifts) I altered one of the poems on a whim, and the result, in my opinion, was much better than the version that I put in the chapbook.
The original poem was called "Ripples" and this is what it was:
Life is like a ripple on the river;
a tossed stone shattering
the calm waters.
Each man's fold on the water's face
bends and grows with the flow
of ice-cold time
shaping and melding with other wrinkles,
giving texture and form
to the rich portrait
on the liquid canvas of history
in the shadow of
the stone-thrower.
Now, that poem is actually a more condensed version of a more verbose poem, the original text of which I've long since discarded. I thought "Ripples" was pretty good at that time, but then when I changed it into this new version, "Throwing Stones," which I think is a lot better:
Streaks in the stream--
tossed stones shatter
calm waters.
Tension-creases
grow with the flow
of frigid time;
blind bending ruts
lend fragile form
to fine art on
crystal canvas,
fractured into
fine flecks of frost:
the stone-thrower
tossed another
shattering sphere.
After making these changes, and changing the title, it's almost a completely different poem. The flow is different, the imagery is different, and the whole thing (in my opinion) is much more obscure, which I like: it opens the poem up to many more meanings. My core idea is still there, but now I think the reader is invited to ponder the images and their meaning as well as the overall meaning of the poem. This is what I want to do with all my poetry, in the end. I love reading poetry that accomplishes these things, so I want to be able to do the same thing, but in my own idiosyncratic way. I'm still a student, and have a long time and a long way to go before my poetry can be considered "good" but I'm going to be persistent.
This free verse poem is a far cry from my usual work, which is highly structured with meter and rhyme and stanzas, etc. This is mostly an exercise in concision, trying to clip and prune the poem down to its bare bones, where no word or punctuation mark can be removed or altered; that would be like taking out a skeleton's collarbone, or taking out some vertebrae. It just wouldn't work without it. I still love structured poetry; where other people feel restricted and constricted by form, I feel liberated. It's like putting together a puzzle made of a million pieces, but when they are all aligned, the result is a beautiful and polished piece of art. It's like taking a blank canvas and painting a beautiful picture. The form of the poem, the restriction, is simply the edges of the canvas; within the canvas, anything is possible. With free verse, there is no canvas....just splashing color on the world at will. But with such limitless possibilities, there's also no limit to how loose and fragile the poem can be. The restrictions of the form canvas force the colors into a distinct area, a compact place, squeezing it all together in a dense mass of brilliance.
And really, the term "free verse" is often misinterpreted. People put most emphasis on the word "free," but the word "verse" is just as important. Free verse does have a meter, it just doesn't align with the specified meter of traditional poetic forms. The best free verse is still metrically sound, and the best free verse poet is aware of the meter in his poetry. For example, a Shakespearean Sonnet would have, most of the time, a clearly defined iambic rhythm that sounds almost musical (daDAdaDAdaDAdaDAdaDA) whereas a free verse poem could throw together any number of different poetic feet, and still have it sound good, like some anapests, dactyls and trochees. What seems like a random hodgepodge of sounds the great free verse poet actually assembled purposefully to lend more linguistic power to his poem. This is what separates a good free verse poet from a bad or common poet.
Free verse isn't my forte, so I was pretty pleased with "Throwing Stones" and several other free verse poems I managed to crank out for my chapbook. I'll devote some days in this blog to looking at free verse stuff, and other days to formal poetry. I plan on making certain days about certain subjects, and when I figure out what the structure will be, I'll post it up here. For now I'll say good-bye, and I hope everyone has a great day.
The original poem was called "Ripples" and this is what it was:
Life is like a ripple on the river;
a tossed stone shattering
the calm waters.
Each man's fold on the water's face
bends and grows with the flow
of ice-cold time
shaping and melding with other wrinkles,
giving texture and form
to the rich portrait
on the liquid canvas of history
in the shadow of
the stone-thrower.
Now, that poem is actually a more condensed version of a more verbose poem, the original text of which I've long since discarded. I thought "Ripples" was pretty good at that time, but then when I changed it into this new version, "Throwing Stones," which I think is a lot better:
Streaks in the stream--
tossed stones shatter
calm waters.
Tension-creases
grow with the flow
of frigid time;
blind bending ruts
lend fragile form
to fine art on
crystal canvas,
fractured into
fine flecks of frost:
the stone-thrower
tossed another
shattering sphere.
After making these changes, and changing the title, it's almost a completely different poem. The flow is different, the imagery is different, and the whole thing (in my opinion) is much more obscure, which I like: it opens the poem up to many more meanings. My core idea is still there, but now I think the reader is invited to ponder the images and their meaning as well as the overall meaning of the poem. This is what I want to do with all my poetry, in the end. I love reading poetry that accomplishes these things, so I want to be able to do the same thing, but in my own idiosyncratic way. I'm still a student, and have a long time and a long way to go before my poetry can be considered "good" but I'm going to be persistent.
This free verse poem is a far cry from my usual work, which is highly structured with meter and rhyme and stanzas, etc. This is mostly an exercise in concision, trying to clip and prune the poem down to its bare bones, where no word or punctuation mark can be removed or altered; that would be like taking out a skeleton's collarbone, or taking out some vertebrae. It just wouldn't work without it. I still love structured poetry; where other people feel restricted and constricted by form, I feel liberated. It's like putting together a puzzle made of a million pieces, but when they are all aligned, the result is a beautiful and polished piece of art. It's like taking a blank canvas and painting a beautiful picture. The form of the poem, the restriction, is simply the edges of the canvas; within the canvas, anything is possible. With free verse, there is no canvas....just splashing color on the world at will. But with such limitless possibilities, there's also no limit to how loose and fragile the poem can be. The restrictions of the form canvas force the colors into a distinct area, a compact place, squeezing it all together in a dense mass of brilliance.
And really, the term "free verse" is often misinterpreted. People put most emphasis on the word "free," but the word "verse" is just as important. Free verse does have a meter, it just doesn't align with the specified meter of traditional poetic forms. The best free verse is still metrically sound, and the best free verse poet is aware of the meter in his poetry. For example, a Shakespearean Sonnet would have, most of the time, a clearly defined iambic rhythm that sounds almost musical (daDAdaDAdaDAdaDAdaDA) whereas a free verse poem could throw together any number of different poetic feet, and still have it sound good, like some anapests, dactyls and trochees. What seems like a random hodgepodge of sounds the great free verse poet actually assembled purposefully to lend more linguistic power to his poem. This is what separates a good free verse poet from a bad or common poet.
Free verse isn't my forte, so I was pretty pleased with "Throwing Stones" and several other free verse poems I managed to crank out for my chapbook. I'll devote some days in this blog to looking at free verse stuff, and other days to formal poetry. I plan on making certain days about certain subjects, and when I figure out what the structure will be, I'll post it up here. For now I'll say good-bye, and I hope everyone has a great day.
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