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A New Poetics

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free verse writing poetry editing - 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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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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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
Through my veins; discordant harmonies
Hang there, swirling in the dark
Like broken dreams.

Those amber-eyed sentries of night
Stalk the shivering shadows, slinking
Through a darkened world, existing
For none but themselves. Unbound

From daylight's chaining rays, they run
Together, hunt together, play together
In that place where words run dry,
Where dreams reside, where things are seen

By a different light, breathing the wild,
Free air. Other than wolves, only Adam had
been
There.

This is the new version:

Orchestral keening kicks blood
through my veins; discordant
harmonies hang swirling in
the dark like broken dreams.

Those amber-eyed sentries of night
prowl the edges of human thought,
passing the bounds of cultured land:
they forge an ancient path unbound

from daylight's heavy chains. They run
as one, hunt as one, play as one
in a place where words run dry,
where dreams reside, where life is

seen by a different light, breathing
the wild, free air. Besides the wolves,
only Adam had been there.

"Howl" is about wolves, pretty much. I wrote the first stanza as a description of the sound of wolves' howling, waking me from my slumber. It's also about the idea of wildness. I've always had a passionate yearning for the wild. I've sometimes thought of finding some deserted cabin in the pacific northwest and becoming a writer-hermit, with no company except the trees, the sky, the wind, the ground, and the animals. But then I realized I liked having conversations way too much for that, and I know from experience that squirrels and pine trees are poor conversation partners.

About the mention of Adam in the end. Did you know that God created Adam in the wilderness outside of the Garden of Eden? It was after God created him that He put him in the Garden, and Eve was created right there in the Garden. I thought that was such a cool idea, that Man in his original form was in the wild, untamed place. I'll probably write more poetry on this subject in the future; it's very close to my heart.

So, about my changes to the poem. I stopped capitalizing the first letters of each line, since that's really a Sonnet thing, and I never really understood that tradition anyway. I took out a couple extraneous words here and there, and altered some other phrases, to tighten it up and make it flow better. For example, I took out the "there," in the first stanza since it was unnecessary and kind of interrupted the flow. Also I changed "daylight's chaining rays" to "daylight's heavy chains" because I think it flows better the second way.

I changed the middle stanza to make the description of wolves align itself more with the idea of wildness, that wild place that exists outside of human society, that night-time place of secrets and freedom. I also brought the last part back up into its own line, because I felt the original felt sort of contrived, and the power I wanted it to have, I felt, was not there.

That brings me to another topic in poetry: enjambment. Enjambment is when a line of poetry spills into the next line. Whenever there isn't a full stop (?, !, .) at the end of a line, it's considered enjambment. Though nowadays it's normal to put pauses at the end of a line, like commas, semicolons, colons or dashes. So I think of pure enjambment as being a line that doesn't have any kind of grammatical pause at its end.

Enjambment shouldn't be done randomly or "willy-nilly." When done right, it can be a powerful tool of bringing multiple meanings and emotions into a poem. Enjambment, I think, is most effective when the truncated thought/sentence can still stand on its own and have its own meaning, but when the next line is added to it to make a complete sentence or clause, then it has a different meaning.

For example, in the third stanza of "Howl" (2nd version) I wrote "from daylight's heavy chains. They run" and that's the end of the line. To me, "They run" by itself could have been the end of the poem, implying maybe that the wolves run from the chains, or from daylight in general, or just for the heck of it because they have the freedom to do so. But then when you keep reading and add the rest of the stanza to it, it makes a different meaning. That, to me, is the point of enjambment.

I'm still getting the hang of purposeful enjambment, since writing structured forms like villanelles and sonnets forces you to stop a line after a certain number of syllables, regardless of what the word is at the end. In this way, it's difficult to write formal verse and make it meaningful because A) you have a syllabic restriction to adhere to B) a rhyme scheme to adhere to, and C) it must still make sense and be meaningful. I personally enjoy this challenge, but I think this is why a lot of people are turned off from writing formal verse.

Take some time today to slow down and take a look at the world around you. Pay close attention to every detail of the sunset, the clouds, the animals, the smells, everything. Just think about how lucky you are to be alive in such a wonderful world. Maybe the day will wring a poem out of you.

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