POETICKS

Below I prove that what many poet-teachers tell those wanting to become poet is 100% valid: if you want to become as good a poet as you can be, write poetry every day. This is easy to do is you are willing to write anything.  Be willing!  You can destroy the bad stuff later.  And you’ll be surprised to find that soon you’ll occasionally write something pretty good even if you had absolutely no desire to write anything, so just scribbled enough words to be able fulfill your daily requirement.  More often you’ll write crap . . . but stumble into something with potential.

I suspect that if you do this long enough–five or ten years–you’ll start automatically writing good, sometimes great, poems almost every day.  John M. Bennett does.  I can’t verify this from my own experience, because I’ve never written a poem or more a day.  In fact, I think I’ve gone several months without writing a single all-text poem–until today.  I’m not sure why this is.  I once wrote a novel over 200,000 words in length, daily writing two or three thousand words–except a couple of times.  (I do think breaks of a day or weekend are a good idea.)  And I’ve written a daily diary entry for years, finally getting too disgust with how wretchedly dull they were that I stopped for several months.  I’m back to doing them now.

I may have too deep a null zone to be able to do more than a bit of prose when I’m at its bottom, which seems to occur more frequently as I age.  When I was in my twenties and thirties, I specialized in playwriting, and pretty much did the equivalent of a poem-a-day.  I think one reason I never got into the habit (except for a few short periods of maybe a month or two) is that I didn’t consider myself primarily a poet until my forties.  Even then, I considered myself as much a critic and theoretical psychologist as poet.  After today, though, I’m going to try to take my advice and be a poet, however horrible, at least once a day.

Okay, here’s the poem I forced myself to write for this blog entry because I had no desire to write anything whatever for it but felt dutybound to:

Is it much of a poem?  I sure don’t think so, although I hope someone will tell me it is, and–frankly–something in me tells me it may be.  I just threw it together out of thoughts I had regarding the website I wrote about in yesterday’s entry.   It was so extremely unheightened that I changed “thought” to “thoughghghghghght” to allow my little joke about making the poem more specialized.  Later I shifted the gh‘s and changed an i to Y.  I had gone from just typing words to minor involvement as a poet in what they were doing.  That will almost always happen, at least when you’ve been writing poems long enough.

Not wanting my text to have no poetic interest, at all, I then went into my “high-poetic mode,” the mode I more or less consciously go into when trying for some kind of haiku-moment or the equivalent in a poem.  Even an epiphany.  I grab something with surrealistic potential and try to lapse into something unrelated to it that I somehow marry to it, anyway (to use an archaic form of “marry”).  Since my Poem poems are automatically surrealistic in that they are about a “real” person” inside the words of a poem, it was easy to steal the crow from a poem of Roethke’s I especially like and just have it fly into the poem I was writing to give the poem an image, at least, and confuse it out of total dullness.

I ended the poem with the crow regionating into the exactly correct letter to give the poem what it needed.  He at first regioned into the letter, but that didn’t sound quite right!  By then I was in my poetry zone–which means I was feeling like I was a poet, but not necessarily composing anything worthwhile.  Once I’m there, I tend to fiddle with a piece, sometimes for hours.  This time I noticed my first line, then “Poem was amused to find out that the”.  I tend to break lines at the “wrong place” now and then to keep a reader on his toes.  Well, seeing another “the” at the end of one of my lines, the idea of the column of “the’s” occurred to me.  That idea, extended to the “The.” at the end (from Stevens) made the whole exercise a Grand Success as far as I was concerned.  I don’t think the “The-column” saved the poem, but I do think it has great potential that I hope to exploit–but feel others should be able to, too.

Note: various versions of the “The column” have no doubt been done by others, but it is excitingly new for me, and I suspect I am using it, or think I am using it, differently from anybody else.  Not that it matters.  Well, I guess it does to me.  Any, the way I hope to use it is as a stack of repetitions of some single word that the body of a poem mostly ignores but sometimes goes through and ends at.  A further idea: a second text like the body of the poem on the other side of the column.  I have other ideas.  (It just struck me that I’ve been influenced a lot by what Alan has been treating us to at New Poetry.  Maybe stealing from him!  I refuse to investigate the matter.)

Oh, one more thing.  The “sur” in the poem was intended to be sure.”  But when I saw it, I didn’t correct it (which would have involved going back to Paint Shop because it’s so hard to get the formatting of poems right as texts at this site) because of its meaning as part of “surreal.”  So I got “making ‘above,’” which fit.  Second piece of advice: be on the look-out for accidents to exploit.

Ha, I see I got a fourteen-liner, counting the title, so I could call this a sonnet, but will not–nor would even if I didn’t have to include the title to get fourteen lines.

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