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writing poetry meter editing - A New Poetics

Poetic Evolution--Trapping the Stars

January 31st 2009 16:15

A while back I posted a poem called "Trapping the Stars." Here it is in that original incarnation:

Soul’s door spreads wide
For stars to move in,
Webbing the velvet void
In nets of smoking silver;

Heart’s hall invites
The whispering winds
To nestle near the hearth
And fan the dwindling flame;

Stars stowed indoors
Shed no light and burn
Their cage into heaps ash,
Blazing into distant darkness--

Wild wind entrapped
Will languish, giving
No spark to withered fire,
Drifting through drafty walls

To freedom.
Heart and soul must venture out
To find the light and light the fire.

Well after a while of it simmering in my brain-pot, I decided I didn't like it at all. The rhythm was all wrong and it was clunky and awkward, and I felt I didn't really get out the ideas that I wanted to. So I changed it.

But instead of condensing it--as I've done with other poetry--I expanded upon it; the poem evolved, matured, into something new and (in my opinion) better. Here's the new version of "Trapping the Stars":

The door of my soul is spread wide,
Luring the winter stars
To lend their light
And web this silent void
With glowing nets of silver lace;

This frigid hall my heart calls home
Invites the mountain winds
To bring fresh air
As food for dying flames
That choke on ashes long since spent.

But stars confined within these walls,

Losing their living light,
Break the brittle
Cage and take their leaving,
Blazing into distant darkness;

When savage wind is kept in chains,
Its breaths will slow and die
And give no spark
To chilling flames, and soon
Will be reborn in open skies.

To try and take the light of life
And keep it in a place
So dense with dark
Can only end in pain:
Regret will be the only food
For fools who try to trap the stars.

As you can see, I made the poem longer, which is the opposite of what I did with my poem "Ripples." Instead of clipping and pruning the excess verbage off the poem like I did before, I cultivated the little seedling poem and helped it blossom into a strong, leafy tree that can stand on its own.

This also goes along with what I had said about Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" poem. With the original version of "Trapping the Stars," I tried too hard to make it 'free verse,' something that I'm not too good at. I was working outside my sphere of expertise, and the result was clunky, awkward, immature, and unfinished. If I'd clipped stuff off of that poem, it only would have become even more awkward and unfinished.

I changed it to have a better, more flowing meter and more concise structure throughout. I generally kept the iambic standard, except for the first two lines. The first line--which can be interpreted several ways--I read as "the DOOR of my SOUL is spread WIDE," as being `~ (`=unstressed, ~= stressed, | = boundary between feet) Ok, so the first line I thought was `~|``~|``~| which is 1 iamb and 2 anapests; definitely a free verse line. But some scholars and academics might make the argument that the line is really `~`|`~`|`~|, which is 2 amphibrachs and an iamb. But at that point it's just splitting hairs; besides, someone else might have a completely different stress pattern than me, anyway. The 2nd line, "LURing the WINter STARS" or ~`|`~|`~| is 1 trochee and 2 iambs. Again, academics might say that it's ~``|~`~|, 1 dactyl and 1 cretic. But again, that would just be splitting hairs.

The rest of the poem is pretty firmly iambic, except for the last 4 lines of the 3rd stanza, which are trochaic: "LOSing their LIVing LIGHT/ BREAK the BRIttle/ CAGE and TAKE their LEAVing/ BLAZing INto (or into) DIStant DARKness." I like switching an iambic poem up with some trochaic, because I feel the trochaic foot feels more urgent than the iamb; it's a bit more galloping, giving a sense of emotional quickness, whereas the iamb is more relaxed and natural feeling. AKA: I made those lines trochaic on purpose, whether the effect I just described was felt by other readers.

It's fine to play around with meter and feet as long as it's done with intention. Like the old saying goes, you need to learn the rules before you can break them. Whether I did so successfully in the new version of "Trapping the Stars" isn't up to me to decide. All I know is I definitely did everything in this poem--the images, the lines, the meter--with intention, so at least I can sleep well with the knowledge that I knew what I was doing. If the poem is actually "good" then I can say that I did a "good" job; but that's for other people to decide.

Have a nice day everyone!

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Posted By: Andrew Kerstetter - Category: formal poetry, writing poetry, meter, 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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