Wednesday, January 6, 2010

An Unprofessional Outpouring

Forgive me, I am here going to engage in the spilling of my own personal eddy of emotions. You may pass over it if you like, but if you are like me, you will be curious.

I have been spending the past hours searching for outlets for my poetry by looking up literary magazines online and reading their poetry excerpts, hoping to find a place for my own writings to fit. The pursuit leaves me overcast with little tingling gusts of . . . thoughts? emotions? Can I be depressed and stimulated at the same time?

I can't honestly pretend to be good at understanding other people's poetry, but the reading of literary magazine excerpts leaves me with an overall sense of hopelessness. I mean that a flavor of hopelessness seemed to be a characteristic of some of the poems I read. Even if they weren't overtly depressing, I read little that would help steady a soul. People NEED poems that will help them see truth beyond the petty, dismal things that can seem to dominate existence.

I am realizing that I'm less profound than I thought. My understanding of life really is limited. So it's quite likely the poems I find confusing actually make a good point--I've seen that happen in the past. But as for my own writing, I CANNOT dive into something I perceive as an eddy of fractured images. I can't anchor in the dismal. Each poem, in its own way, has to be a search for the things that last, a catching at the rays of ultimate reality that filter through the chaos of my feelings, experiences, and impressions of the world.

I do think my poems could do some good. Unfortunately,I package them in what seems to be an outdated manner. I didn't notice any examples of rhyming or meter in the excerpts I read. Everyone--here I most likely engage in emotional overstatement--wants what is "new" and "fresh." Doing weird things with language is "daring." I guess it is, but surely all the good old forms which served so many poets in the past (whose work we still read with enjoyment and admiration)are still good for something. Can't they still serve to help us look at old truths in a new way? Thinking of the influence of traditional forms on my poetry, I feel a bit simplistic and out of place--like the home schooler I am, more at home in an older, or younger, world.

4 comments:

  1. this is good. "So it's quite likely the poems I find confusing actually make a good point" <remember this when you listen to music. Do you suppose the styles the classic poets used were "daring" in their day?

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  2. Rants and Ramblings,

    Some of poets' styles, or adaptions of existing styles, were considered "daring." Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry, for example, was very different from that of his peers. Emily Dickinson, on the other hand, punctuated her poems unconventionally but chose to write many of them in a very popular form, that most often used in hymns.

    Concerning your comment about listening to music--I think you will enjoy the following Hopkins quote:

    "Why, sometimes one enjoys and admires the very lines one cannot understand, as for instance 'If it were done when 'tis done' sqq., which is all obscure and disputed, though how fine it is everybody sees and nobody disputes. And so of many more passages of Shakspere[sic] and others."*

    *Hopkins, Gerard Manley. "Letter to Robert Bridges, 2 April 1878." Hopkins: Poems and Prose. New York: Knopf, 1995. 140-141.

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  3. Perhaps the old styles -- which you do so well! -- are the daring styles of today? Keep looking, and send some things out, and see what happens!

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  4. ElenaLee, When I read your poetry, I don' see styles or forms, only beautifully written words that lead me through images and thoughts and help me arrive somewhere new, having learned, or been edified. When I wrote music, I had the hardest time fitting into the contemporary music scene. When in Baltimore where my wife was at Peabldy Conservatory, I was just writing music, and got very issolated. When we moved to Boston, I entered the Doctorate program at Boston University. I write about the issue of fitting into the music scene ther in my book - for about 3 pages. Here is an excerpt:
    In one of my classes I was taught the theory that information in music is conveyed when expectations are thwarted. The 19th century can best be described as the century of aesthetic decadence, stretching the rich language, expanding and exhausting every possible expressive connection for immediate effect. Two centuries of thwarting expectations have left very few and pitifully weak expectations to thwart. If you try to play blocks with a two year old, you quickly find out that they love to knock down anything you build. It’s pretty exciting for a two year old to knock down a tower of blocks, and composers of the 19th and 20th centuries wrote some pretty exciting music. But at the end of the day one is left with a pretty messy room. Entropy. I was left wondering where there was any kind of musical language that was rich enough and sophisticated enough for me to convey all that I wanted to express in music.

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