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free verse writing poetry - A New Poetics

Poetic Pruning---Redemption

February 7th 2009 04:40

This, "Redemption," is the newest incarnation of my old "Entropy" poem, which I posted earlier on the blog:

“Redemption”

The leaves of summer heave in the heat
And give their gasps to drowning limbs
Which lend them drinks to calm their breaths--
Affairs of helpless, seedling love;

Leaf and limb cavort in golden light.

Solstitial wells begin to dry;
Weathered limbs withdraw their wine;
No tiny drops of Spring ambrosia
Will they spare in fading light
For leaves that quake in cooling wind.

Flushed with dim autumnal color,
The leaves expel their final breaths,
Then wither, curl, and die; the feeble limbs,
Soon gone cold, release the shriveled
Corpses into winter’s barren hands.

Naked branches, shaking in the cold,
Are kept from new baptismal wine,
Frozen manna stacked in mounds
Of white about their feet--

Suspended healing hangs
Between the shadow and the light,
Waiting for the resurrection
Of the sun to plant the seeds of Spring

And give repentant trees their leaves,
Restore the breath to broken lungs,
Give life to frozen hearts,
And send redemption
Back to the blood.

I added everything from "Naked branches" and on, stretching the poem to have more meaning and ambiguity. I altered some phrases and words, deleting some things and substituting some things to better enhance the flow of the poem. There are lots of little changes, which I won't go into in detail. Here is the first version for comparative purposes:

The summer leaves gasp in the heat,
Giving their breath to drowning limbs
That offer them drinks in return:
A symbiotic love affair.
Painful pleasure, helpless helping;
Breathless branches grip the sighing leaves.

Solstitial wells begin to dry;
Breaths are fewer, drink is scarcer--
Clutching limbs begin to wither.
They cannot spare a drop for leaves
That blush with slowing, weary breaths
And quiver in the cooling wind.

Flushed with dimming evening colors,
The leaves have ceased their troubled breaths.
Branches clasp the lovely corpses;
They grow cold. Winter’s icy hand
Tears them away; the limbs are left
Naked and alone, swaying in the wind.

And here is the second version:

The summer leaves gasp in the heat,
Giving their breath to drowning limbs
That offer them drinks in return;
A symbiotic love affair--
Sighing leaves caressing breathless boughs.

Solstitial wells begin to dry;
Breaths are fewer, drink is scarcer.
Clutching limbs begin to wither--
They cannot spare a drop for leaves
That blush with slowing, weary breaths
And quiver in the cooling breeze.

Flushed with dimming evening colors,
The leaves soon cease their troubled breaths.
Branches clasp the withered corpses;
Soon grown cold, the hand of winter
Tears them apart, leaving the limbs
Alone and cold, swaying in the wind.

Now compare these two with the newest version, the one at the top. Can you see what I did? Some of the changes are subtle and small; they're obvious to me, but of course they are, since I'm the one who made the changes in the first place. I changed some phrasing, altered some images, replaced some words and deleted others to better preserve the poem's integrity. Once a poem's word-choice and structure call attention to themselves instead of enhancing what the words are saying, then the poem is shoddy and needs revision.

Did I do a good job with this newest version? Well, I like it; but that's not saying much, because most writers like what they write--at least at first they do. If any of you have comments or suggestions to make about the poem, I'm all ears--well, eyes, really. One thing I won't change ever is the word 'solstitial.' It fits the rhythm perfectly, and it fits nicely into the puzzle of the poem. Solstitial is the adjective form of the word Solstice, which is twice a year when either the day is longest--in summer--or the night is longest--in winter. In this poem it could be taken either way, really. The wells of winter would be like melted snow, and the wells of summer are summer rain. Summer is more likely here, since it's referring back to the first stanza during summer.

Hope you all enjoy the poem, and if you have any comments, don't hesitate to say something! Good night everyone!

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Posted By: Andrew Kerstetter - Category: formal poetry, free verse, writing poetry, editing

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Cavernous Night-a narrative poem

January 22nd 2009 01:43

“What do you think?” she asked. The fire
sputtered like the light in her eyes, troubled
by the silence of the dark. “I think I’m cold
and we’ve been out here long enough,”
he said. He never could open the door
of his soul to let the stars in. “Don’t go,”
she whispered, her voice cutting away
layers of rotted dreams like gangrene
off the body of the doe he had shot
the week before. He stood, a tower
of fire wreathed in shadows. Midnight
dew slithered down his body like tiny
serpents. “Look, I’m tired. I just want
to get back home and go to sleep.”
The night swallowed his words whole.
“I’m cold,” he said. She stood up to face
him. “A warm bed won’t cure the kind of cold you are,”
she said. “Sleeping like a dead man
won’t solve anything.” He sighed, a rush
of air combing still lips. “And what would
you know about…” Eyeless masks,
clattering waterfalls leaping into abysses
of solitude. “You’re burnt out,” she said.
“Your fire is gone.” Pines scraped the sky,
claws of a shattered world stretching
for more. “I don’t know what you’re talking
about,” he said, turning toward the darkness.
“Do you remember when you sang to me
in the orchard?” she inquired. The fire
crackled. “Do you remember the days
on the beach?” He turned back; the fire
roared. “Do you remember?” Flames
danced in his eyes. “Can you feel it?
Can you feel?” Tears fell from her
eyes like shards of glass piercing
the framed echoes of distant
memories. Skin on skin: fingers
crossing the great divide
of hearts torn apart by the teeth
of time. “Come back to the fire,”
she breathed. Warmth rose; his heart
swallowed firelight. “Come and sing
the song you sang when the apples
blossomed.” Screaming silence fell
dead when his music echoed in
the cavernous night.

I don't usually break from tradition, but sometimes I'll make exceptions. This poem is one of those times. I barely paid heed to meter--I edited it just so it wouldn't sound too clunky--and there is no rhyme scheme or syllable parameters. This poem relies soley on its figurative language for its poetic power. Yes, it could be read as a block of text, like prose. But I still broke it into lines at strategic places to give certain words, phrases, and ideas more emphasis than they would have gotten if it had been arranged as prose.

Instead of structural and formulaic devices, I used a lot of alliteration, precise word-choice, and elaborate images and metaphors--which evoke an almost stream-of-consciousness feel--to make the poem work. The parallel structure of the real fire and the fire in the man's heart play off each other.

This is one of my least favorite poems, simply because it's not very structured or traditional. But a lot of people have said that this is one of their favorite poems of mine, because of the imagery and metaphors and narrative feel. I suppose everyone has different tastes. If I could have the same level of complex images and emotions AND have precise meter, rhyme, and form, then I think that would be my favorite poem of mine.

I tend to stay away from writing narrative poems just because they often are very long. Not that long poems can't be good; it's just that the longer they are, the more I tend to lose interest. If a poem drags on and on, I get tired and impatient: What's the point of this poem? Where is this poem going? I like reading short/medium length poems that have a nice puncher at the end. However, I have read a couple narrative poems that I thought were excellent: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot and The Death of the Hired Man by Robert Frost.

I like the Prufrock poem more, because I feel he paid closer attention to form, meter, and rhyme while still having extraordinary images and metaphors and a haunting, thought-provoking narrative. That kind of poetry is what I would want to write if I wrote more narrative poems. Frost's poem is more prosaic, kind of like mine, except he was more clear with what was going on. I liked the Frost poem because it has a nice, punchy ending, which I felt was sort of lacking in the Prufrock poem. However, they're both very good, and I recommend them--and any other poems that Frost and Eliot wrote.

I'm currently working on making a rhymed double sestina. That is, a sestina that has an end-rhyme scheme (and still repeats the same words as a sestina should); the 'double' aspect means that instead of 6 stanzas of 6 lines and a 3 line tornada, there will be 12 stanzas of 12 lines and a 6 line tornada at the end. I have the end-words figured out. They will be: light, mold, face, grow, race, flow, cold, fight, old, know, erase, and night. Now all I have to do is fill in the slots. It will probably be a narrative poem; it's going to be difficult, but I know that with time, patience, and effort, I can make something worthwhile with it.

Good night everyone.

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Posted By: Andrew Kerstetter - Category: free verse, writing poetry

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Darkness Deposed

January 15th 2009 18:31

That time of night when you might behold
a slit of light, gray and cold, slowly
opening the east, the dawn is told
to break the dark that clasps the world
softly.
You might just want to shut your eyes while
fingers of light grip the night and rake
off layers of velvet that beguile
the heart to think it cannot take
dawn’s smile.
Oceans of orange and arrows of red
drip from darkness’ dawn-inflicted wound,
washing the land in light that bled
through slashes in shadows damned
and doomed.
Don’t close your eyes, but open them wide;
this tide of piercing clearness—blinding
vision— rising sun will deftly divide
dark from light. It reaches inside,
reminding
of shadow and flame juxtaposed
of old in our souls. Don’t you want this?
the light of dawn filling that abyss,
a searing pain, darkness deposed
by bliss
that’s brought by the sight of the light,
sight outside of the specter
of night? Do you still want to fight?
Just let go in submission
to this
divine ignition.

The short 1-2 word connectors are actually supposed to be located on the right side of the poem instead of the left...when I post it, they automatically justify to the left. Rather annoying.

This poem is about sunrise superficially, but I think it pretty obviously goes a lot deeper than that. The duality of darkness and light has always been something that fascinated me as a poet and a thinker. I enjoy trying to take archetypal themes like this and bring a new perspective to it. I've written a lot of other poems about darkness and light, and shadows, and cold, exploring everyday minutia involving these things and somehow attempting to tie these thoughts in with deep worldview questions and values.

I used meter and rhyme and alliteration in this poem, but other than that it has a form of its own. I'm not sure I ever, or am able to, write other poems in this exact form. In its first incarnation I tried to have a consistent syllabic limitation per line, but after writing it like that, it sounded wooden and stilted, so I cropped and pruned it to be what it is now. From this experience I've come to believe that it's only wise to give yourself syllabic parameters if you're working with traditional forms, or trying to play off of a traditional form. For something like this, that has a unique shape of its own, it's better to just let the words flow.

Of course I still have all my lines have a similar pattern, like the short connecting stumps all have around two or three syllables, and the longer lines are usually somewhere from seven to ten syllables. I didn't really plan it this way; it just fell in after I cropped out unnecessary words, and switched out some odd-sounding words for more euphonious synonyms and switched the syntax around in some places to sound more natural. I got rid of the first version a while ago, otherwise I would post it for comparison.

This poem is a good example of an important aspect of my personal poetics; that is, that written poetry has two distinct and important structural dimensions: aural and visual. Putting abstract ideas aside, the way the words and punctuation fit together produce certain sounds when read aloud or mentally (aural aspect), and the way it's arranged on the page slightly affects the aural aspect, but it really gives a poem almost an entirely different level of meaning.

For example, I could have all the same words and punctuation, arranged (grammatically) in the same way, but have it in prose, block-text form, or in neat little Shakespearean quatrains. I don't believe the poem would have the same feel if that were the case. I don't consider this to be a discussion of 'concrete' poetry, since usually concrete poems' text takes on a specific shape. I suppose what I'm thinking of would be more aptly termed 'visual rhetoric.' The way the words are arranged on the page couples with the sounds the poem produces to create a twisty candy cane of art and thought.

I'll speak more about this at another time. Tomorrow I'll talk about poetry before the time of rhyme and sonnets. Believe it or not, the highly structured, end-rhyming, iambic pentameter poetry was only really popular starting a few hundred years ago...for millenia before that, and hundreds of years later (modern day) people wrote much different poetry. But I'll talk about that tomorrow. Have a nice day, everyone!

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Posted By: Andrew Kerstetter - Category: free verse, writing poetry, meter, editing

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Trapping the Stars

January 13th 2009 19:07

Soul’s door spreads wide

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Posted By: Andrew Kerstetter - Category: free verse, writing poetry

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Coffee Stains

January 9th 2009 20:01

The coffee-maker grumbles its birth-pains

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Posted By: Andrew Kerstetter - Category: free verse, writing poetry

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Condensed poetry- Howl

January 8th 2009 18:00

Here's another poem which I changed since its original incarnation. Thankfully I changed this one in time for it to be put in the chapbook. It's called "Howl," and this is the original:

Orchestral keening kicks blood

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Posted By: Andrew Kerstetter - Category: free verse, writing poetry, editing

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