Good morning everyone. My same is Dalton Aday, and I enjoy writing. The concept of form versus constraints is an interesting one. I have always admired the challenge of being creative within a given set of guidelines, but the allure of poetry without constraints has recently started stirring my attention. I would rather read constrained poetry with set rhyme patterns and syllable counts per line; however, i feel now that greater control of the disbursement of emotion can be garnered through the specific placement of words and phrases within a line or stanza without regard to any set of constraints other than those associated to the piece by the writer with the explicit intention of conveying explicit meaning. Constrained poems like ghazals and sonnets forced me to use allegories, hard to interpret stock images, and metaphors only understood by me to maintain whatever control I could over of the poems constraints. Through the ignoring of placement of images and ideas to maintain specific structure, I have found that my own poems have more meaning, and are much more emotionally charged. Except this one, its just weird:
Plectrum drives down
the road to the machine head is bumpy red metal
while down below the plectrum plucks away
the lights turn green to red and slide around
backing up traffic by keeping perfect tune with
the feet banging horribly on
the plastic faces and walls of noise
they stop and the plucking starts as
a tacet for fear ends and
the silence is broken by up and down
beatings of silver lines
in lines, in line with
the cowboys beating whore hearts of
checkered dresses starring down
the road but not up the mountain
Its nicked and shit crowds under the silver but
the deadening filth takes tone just how you like it and
the plucking never stops ringing until it pisses off your friends while
they show you the dark thing and seven minor bees rip through
stinging the shit out of everything until
the plucking stops and
the eruption begins on the road
melting faces of on lookers and
the smell of sticky piss haunts the beetles in ways
we'll never understand
Dalton, I have to admire the detailed way you lay out your reasons for your compositional preference. At the same time, I wonder if there aren't some underexamined assumptions and claims in there.
ReplyDeleteFor example, is emotion really something that one can "disburse" throughout a poem, like color images or capital M's or references to tax codes? And in what way exactly do forms like the ghazal or sonnet "force" one to use allegories, metaphors, etc.? How do those devices help one negotiate the constraints? I'm not saying that this is false; I'm just curious, as it's a provocative idea.
I fully believe that an author has the ability to disburse an emotion throughout a poem. Whether its the overall tone of the poem or the turn in a sonnet. The author has control over this while still following the constraints that have been imposed. As for the sonnets and ghazals, the contraints, whether the syllable count or rhyme pattern, can make it tricky to be straight forward in explicit meaning. Literary devices give the author an amount of wiggle room in the selection of what is to be injected. A traditional ghazal uses stock imagery and metaphor extensively. By considering this before hand, an author can negotiate the constraints more readily in an attempt to place the right image or idea in the right place. In english, the ghazal is a very difficult poem to keep true to its traditional constraints, and by using certain devices, it can become far less challenging.
ReplyDelete