The Education of J.H.S.

This morning, I found myself trying to find out where I stand on poetry. Not ON POETRY, like some sort of treatise, or in the grand scheme of things. Just right now. The work I’m doing falls into two categories: writing and revising. Is there really anything else?

Last semester, I joined my first writing group and took my first creative writing class. The class was miserable, but I love the writing group (most of the time), have met some great writers, and gotten a little bit of something worthwhile when it comes to critique. For a few months, I was going every week, and had to have something new to read. It was good for me to have to write constantly, and it seemed I was on a creative streak at first. That’s kind of gone away for now, but I figure the process is all ebb and flow, and am not too concerned about why I feel less creative now.

So, from these poems, I probably produced 10-12 drafts. One of them was really horrible, so I just threw it out (well, I liked it at first, but after the critique I realized that the images weren’t as good or original as I thought). I also took in a sonnet I wrote for a class for extra credit (I got four points, which was the most out of anyone in the class), but the writing group didn’t like it too well. One of the most knowledgeable writers said it was the most “pedantic” poem he had read of mine. Bah!

I haven’t been to writing group for a while, so I’m out of a weekly routine, but right now I’m working on three new poems. They are very different in style.

The first uses no punctuation, and some of the phrases are missing words or run together somehow. It’s inspired by a photograph of someone on the beach, and it seems like it is gonna be about fading beauty. It kind of reminds me of this poem:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=181511

The second is really trying to mimic this poem, in its structure of lyric and narrative passages, a kind of blending of voices:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=239346

I’m not normally a fan of narrative poetry, but I thought the fusing together of the more lyric parts and then the pseudo-monologue was brilliant, and had to at least see what it would lead to. So far, I think this poem is about words, or the power of words.

And the third. It’s not a prose poem, but I feel like it is somehow related to the prose poem of Stein. I don’t understand her work, but this poem was also trying to mimic something I did in an earlier poem, that people in my writing group did not like, but I thought was interesting. They both have rather long lines, and I try to use symbols and images to suggest themes or emotions, while still keeping the language as wholly lyric as possible. There is a narrative inside my head for both poems, but I’m trying to show snapshots of the narrative that let you see parts of the narrative and gain an overall sense about them.

It’s kind of like these poems, but with less of an absurd quality:
http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue11/story.htm

Then I have the revising. Right now, my revising is mainly trying to find shapes I like for the poems. I had originally written them all left justified with normal line lengths and stanza breaks, but then I bought “Crush” by Richard Siken, and had a favorite poet wonder why people always stick to the same format. He also suggested that it was the “white” way to write poems (he’s Chicano), and it just made me think about making individual poems with pleasing shapes on the page, and not limiting myself because of what’s become the norm.

Eventually, I want my work to be “lyric experiments”. I find experimental work very interesting, though I’m not sure I have the right kind of mind to understand the theory behind that style of writing. I find the work on some L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets interesting. I like poems that deal with linguistics in some way. Or play on word roots. Or use words in unusual syntactical patterns. At the same time, I don’t want my poems to seem to absurd like Flarf.

One day, while having lunch with a friend, I told them I wanted my poems to be like strange, writhing creatures you held in your hands, and didn’t quite know what they were. They acted like I was insane. Maybe that’s a sign of where I’m going to end up?