I used to disdain poetry. I wondered, “is there really anything worse?” And I disdained it for what I felt was a very compelling reason: I used to write poetry.
In fact, poetry used to consume me. I was a voracious reader of poetry, and therefore a voracious writer of it. It was an inglorious habit. When you tell people you’re a poet, they imagine the worst of you.
This week, we visit P.L. Thomas’ excellent site “The Becoming Radical.”
In this post, Thomas discusses the need for poetry in education, and how poetry and fiction seem to be falling by the wayside in favor of testing scores needed to justify school funding.
The testing requirements alone are evil, but the cutting out of poetry from the curriculum is a travesty. Poetry is an essential to education as well as life. But I’ll shut up about it because Thomas puts it far better than I can.
In Defense of Poetry: “Oh My Heart”
“No, no. You’ve got something the test and machines will never be able to measure: you’re artistic. That’s one of the tragedies of our times, that no machine has ever been built that can recognize that quality, appreciate it, foster it, sympathize with it.”
Paul Proteus to his wife Anita in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano
“So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens” is, essentially, a grammatical sentence in the English language. While the syntax is somewhat out of the norm, the diction is accessible to small children—the hardest word likely being “depends.” But “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams is much more than a sentence; it is a poem:
so much depends
upona red wheel
barrowglazed with rain
waterbeside the white
chickens.
A relatively simple English language sentence shaped into purposeful lines and stanzas becomes poetry. And like…
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Bad writing.
I mean really bad writing.
I love it.
I find it inspirational. Whenever I read a terrible published work, I step back with a little reverence and more awe than I anticipated.
Discovering really terrible writing is like discovering a smell so bad that you have to share it with family and friends. It’s so bad that it becomes a bonding experience.
I am still going on my second pass on the novel. I have jumped around as needed. Second drafts are writing triage. I have to decide what can be saved and what isn’t worth the time to fix.
What I have to beware of is constant polishing. There will come a point where I have to “abandon” my novel. That isn’t to say that I am quitting. It means that I have to declare it “finished” and move on to my many other projects.
Continue reading “GAH! Second Passes Pass So Slow! Bonus: Poetry!”
NOTE: This is, of course, my opinion. If you don’t share it, hooray! It makes our time together more interesting.
My attitude about poetry has shifted over time. At first, I read and wrote nothing but poetry. Then I fell away from poetry and had a lot of scorn for it. Now, I’m slowly coming back around.
With some major caveats.
The BIGGEST minutiae 