The affliction of creativity
Arethosemyfeet
Shipmate
in Heaven
Periodically I get words and phrases coming into my head of a vaguely poetic/lyrical nature, and occasionally one lingers long enough that I have to exorcise it onto the page. I reckon that, like the monkeys on the typewriters, if I do it enough times I'll eventually have something worth reading. Until such time, the poor saps who've clicked on this thread will have to suffer my latest:
My life is an open book, O Lord,
To you who are the author of my soul
Day by day I take the pen and write
My each word clear and noted in your sight
You are the author of my soul
Please take my hand in yours
Show me what, and how to write
That my life may echo yours
As you look upon my life, O God
Some pages in my book make me ashamed
I don’t want to, I fear to look
At words which show that I’ve caused others’ pain
Every day when I sit down to write
My heart’s words are your Holy Spirit’s song
Yet each day when words are put to page
Songs turn to murmurs, poetry to noise
You took up the pen yourself, O Lord
Eternal Word made once of mortal flesh
Your book stained with tears and marked with blood
Your perfect life lived once for others’ gain.
My life is an open book, O Lord,
To you who are the author of my soul
Day by day I take the pen and write
My each word clear and noted in your sight
You are the author of my soul
Please take my hand in yours
Show me what, and how to write
That my life may echo yours
As you look upon my life, O God
Some pages in my book make me ashamed
I don’t want to, I fear to look
At words which show that I’ve caused others’ pain
Every day when I sit down to write
My heart’s words are your Holy Spirit’s song
Yet each day when words are put to page
Songs turn to murmurs, poetry to noise
You took up the pen yourself, O Lord
Eternal Word made once of mortal flesh
Your book stained with tears and marked with blood
Your perfect life lived once for others’ gain.
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So we get
Villanelle, Villanelle
You're as crazy as Hell
Berlin or Rome
You send them home
Villanelle
Not sure whether to let this develop
Eh, what's the worst that could happen?
When I'm an old woman I shall wear crocs
Or pink sandals with red socks
I shall pluck out my eyebrow hairs one by one
Drawing on new ones with green Sharpie pen
If you happen to stare or sneer at my style
I shall fart
Loudly
And pretend it was you
I'll point and hold my nose and say 'pooh!'
I shall merrily flaunt a muffin top
And go barefoot without washing my feet
Or clipping my toenails
Or shaving my toes
I shall write all my letters in Comic Sans font
Sprinkling apostrophe's in plural's for fun
Running on my sentence's
Irregardless of your preference's
I shall randomly mix up there, their and they're
Never using an Oxford comma
And I'll aks for an expresso when I go to Starbucks
Or maybe a cachuppino
With less sprinkles and fewer milk
And if you try to correct me
Or even
just
wince
I shall fart again
Loudly
And say 'Oh dear, I shat myself'
What a thread such as this might be for
"If your verse you would flog
Put it up on your blog!"
Was the Host-comment I had in store.
Then I woke up this morning to see
A blossoming of creativity
With more poets sharing
Their verse (oh, how daring!)
So I said to myself, "Let it be."*
-Trudy, Heavenly Host
*For the benefit of those students who ask, "But Miss, what do the poem MEAN?" I offer a prose paraphrase: While a thread with one person sharing something they wrote might initially seem not to have much room for discussion, if others want to continue adding their own bits of random creativity, we Heavenly Hosts will keep it open for now and see how it goes.
Everything IMO works better with attention to scansion, metre and rhyme. The discipline of writing to a specific verse form clarifies the thought and stretches the conception. With any luck it will take you in directions you had not thought of, spark unsuspected connections, ideas will rise like fish to food.
It’s bloody difficult of course, but that’s the point.
They reside in my brain but never seem to really attach themselves to specific incidents in a way that would make a poem.
The syntax of poetry, I think, needs to be that bit more compressive than ordinary speech. No superfluous words. Rhyme intensifies the sense of movement. Think, if Donne had written -
GOE, and catche a falling starre,
Get with child a mandrake roote,
Tell me, where all past yeares go
Or who cleft the Divels hoof,
The scansion’s the same but it doesn’t work, does it?
Oh, and I agree about Rossetti (‘If I were a wise man/I would do my part’ irresistibly suggests ‘If I were a wise man/I would do my thing’)
And the discipline of producing work for others to read and comment on week in and week out is, I think, the best way to develop your creativity. Remember: Learning the rules of your craft won’t stop you being a genius!
Anent Rossetti... I thought I was the only person who was irritated by that line. It has always seemed to me that she had already run out of steam and didn't stop when she should have done - a terrible line. I have some verses that have been stalled for that very reason, for a very long time, and refuse to use plug words just to get it finished.
My life’s an open book to you
The author of my soul
Each day I take the pen and write
Words I pray will you extol
You are the author of my soul
Take my hand in yours
Then show me what and how to write
That my life may echo yours
Line 4 is not quite right. I'm thinking ROWAN TREE for the tune.
The image of writing/authoring is fair enough, but it needs to be pushed further. Into some specific, grounded sense of what it is like to shape meaning into words. Heaney’s Digging is a case in point. You feel his labour with the pen in precisely evoking the physical labours of his father and grandfather.
Also the repetition of the line ‘The author of my soul’ sets up the expectation that the last line will be a further extension and intensification in the manner of Goethe’s Kennst du das Land?
Victorian poets (and earlier) would freely alter the word-order of spoken English, sometimes to very interesting effect (so that when Thomas Gray writes And all the air a solemn stillness holds, we’re left deliberately unsure of whether the air holds the stillness or vice-versa) but this sort of inversion really is best avoided in modern writing.
As far as possible go for everyday words rather than the arcane or the unfamiliar; they do have their place, but it’s a limited one - and extol is probably just such a word. The vocabulary of Tell out, my soul by Tim Dudley-Smith is an object lesson in using everyday language to superb effect.
Have you found Rhymezone? It’s a wonderfully useful site, and I recommend it strongly!
And good luck!
From this rubble you gradually sift out the bits that cohere. You will often have to discard favourites (‘kill your darlings’) but hopefully find new and better ones.
The way to avoid the any-word-so-it-fits trap is not to let it happen. You know when a line is fundamentally feeble. Try again. Fail better (as the man said).
Very interesting - and very good advice!
When Anthony Payne was recreating Elgar’s unfinished Third Symphony - a truly wonderful job, in which the original Elgar shines through - he apparently found among Elgar’s sketches whole sections that had been completely worked out in short score, but with no indication of where they were supposed to fit in the complete work, or even what the expected tempi or full orchestration would be.
Exactly the same principle as you are advocating, applied in his case to music rather than poetry!
I would, perhaps, recommend octosyllabic couplets as a form that could be practiced before launching into villanelles or sonnets.
I wish I could compose in my head, but unless I write or type immediately, I just forget the lines.
Decasyllabic blank verse is much more straightforward, as it matches almost perfectly the rhythms of spoken English. Indeed, A P Herbert once delared that he'd written a play in blank verse because he didn't have the time to write it in prose.
But other forms are available. I would nevertheless attempt something with rhyme in there somewhere, because I think it is such a good mental gymnastic.
There are actually two repeating lines in a villanelle; using the Dylan Thomas as an example they are Do not go gentle into that good night and Rage, rage against the dying of the light. That’s very effective in that particular poem, but the constraints that the form forces on the writer are very tricky to navigate, as I’ve found myself.
The mental gymnastics required to write in a fixed form - a sonnet’s a nice example - are very valuable, I agree. The trick is to get the rhymes to work without them obviously controlling the poem - if something is in only because of the rhyme - and obviously so - then there's a problem.
It is all on the net. The last time I added a link to my site to a post, the effect seemed to be to bring a thread on cooperative writing of triolets to a rapid halt. Oh well, it's easy enough to find.
I agree. It's a completely different process from prose fiction which I can happily write straight onto the screen. Writing prose is like bricklaying (for me anyway) with a straightforward relationship between one line, one thought, one paragraph, and the next. Creating a poem, which I always do reluctantly and usually because the prose requires it, is more like juggling a lot of words and ideas in the air and freeze-framing it when everything is in the 'right' position.