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don't throw me into that briar patch.
Oct. 19th, 2009 10:06 amI got up out of bed last night so I wouldn't forget the idea I had.
I keep thinking I should love poetry, but I almost never do because it always reads like someone's half-assed outline to a story they're not actually going to write the rest of.
So I've been thinking about what kinds of formal poetry would be really interesting, what kinds of poetics would apply to modern American English.
I came up with several ideas. 1) fore-rhyme. I grew up in the midwest where almost every unstressed syllable is schwa. Lots of things sort of rhyme when the accent is like that. But it's really rare for the first syllable of something to be unaccented. I think we should come up with a fore-rhyme method, where "crying" and "bride" are considered to have fore-rhyme.
2) Combination/expansion of other poetic formats, that might take advantage of word processing/layout effects.
I'd like to see, for example, a haiku written vertically, one word per line... but the rest of the poem fills in each line. Preferably with the haiku part in the center. And perhaps with style points given for using fewer overall lines in the poem. (So longer, multisyllabic haiku words would be cooler.) But it has to actually make sense and have its own rhyme (or fore-rhyme), meter, alliteration, assonance, metaphor, etc. It has to be an actual poem, but there could be a super-imposed structure restricting the format.
I guess my problem with a lot of poetry is that we're told over and over again that the poet is restricted and couldn't come straight out and say something coherently. But when it's non-rhyming, non-metrical, non-formal, free verse... it hardly seems like the poet was restricted at all. It's not poetry because that's the best choice, it's poetry because the poet's an asshole too ignorant to even be pretentious.
I keep thinking I should love poetry, but I almost never do because it always reads like someone's half-assed outline to a story they're not actually going to write the rest of.
So I've been thinking about what kinds of formal poetry would be really interesting, what kinds of poetics would apply to modern American English.
I came up with several ideas. 1) fore-rhyme. I grew up in the midwest where almost every unstressed syllable is schwa. Lots of things sort of rhyme when the accent is like that. But it's really rare for the first syllable of something to be unaccented. I think we should come up with a fore-rhyme method, where "crying" and "bride" are considered to have fore-rhyme.
2) Combination/expansion of other poetic formats, that might take advantage of word processing/layout effects.
I'd like to see, for example, a haiku written vertically, one word per line... but the rest of the poem fills in each line. Preferably with the haiku part in the center. And perhaps with style points given for using fewer overall lines in the poem. (So longer, multisyllabic haiku words would be cooler.) But it has to actually make sense and have its own rhyme (or fore-rhyme), meter, alliteration, assonance, metaphor, etc. It has to be an actual poem, but there could be a super-imposed structure restricting the format.
I guess my problem with a lot of poetry is that we're told over and over again that the poet is restricted and couldn't come straight out and say something coherently. But when it's non-rhyming, non-metrical, non-formal, free verse... it hardly seems like the poet was restricted at all. It's not poetry because that's the best choice, it's poetry because the poet's an asshole too ignorant to even be pretentious.
the briar patch was
shaped like a
triangle. it was
shorn down to
dry grass and
shrubbery which sadly
writhed under
shining sun while
prying hoes
shoveled weeds away.
