A Writer's Notebook, Day Three-Hundred-And-Seventy-Four
I've been spending a fair amount of time today and over the past few days thinking about certain aspects of my recent poems. These poems are very different from many that I have written before, and I am not certain, really, how to describe them. I am working towards this, but do not yet have a clear grasp on the language.
Though I am not yet certain how to connect the ideas, I know I've been thinking about how these poems are exploring something that is connected with form and poetic structure. While we talk of a form in terms of the way it is organized in language, their is always a reasoning that is implied within that structure. The most obvious, or at least well known, example is in the sonnet, where the final couplet takes on weight due to the musicality, and thus it is natural for it to also take on weight in terms of meaning.
Meter and rhyme exist to build patterns, as do many other tools a poet will use, and by operating these tools in a particular way, by creating repetition and variation, a writer is creating expectations, as well as prodding specific sensory experiences in ways that might lend an emotional meaning. The structure of the language is a scaffold that carries meaning. In a formal poem, that scaffold gives the poet something to work with, and the success of the poem is often about how it manages that interaction.
The poems I am writing are not formal, but I think that some of the way in which they work is built upon an understanding that music is a way of making the shape for an argument. The language is, in part, able to imply meaning even when the content is ambiguous, by using sentence structures that have resonance, and by building the shape of an argument or revelation.
I am certain this is not clear, as I am not yet certain of it, but I do know that just beginning to contemplate these ideas here, in this way, with an explicit intent towards unpacking the current trajectory of my work into a clear and conscious understanding is something that I am drawn to now. It can, of course, be a bit dangerous to do that kind of looking, to investigate how things are working, but I find, for myself at least, that when the urge to understand things becomes strong in this way, it is a good sign. It means that I am ready to really understand my current work in a way that will open me up to using these ideas in new and even more exciting ways.
Though I am not yet certain how to connect the ideas, I know I've been thinking about how these poems are exploring something that is connected with form and poetic structure. While we talk of a form in terms of the way it is organized in language, their is always a reasoning that is implied within that structure. The most obvious, or at least well known, example is in the sonnet, where the final couplet takes on weight due to the musicality, and thus it is natural for it to also take on weight in terms of meaning.
Meter and rhyme exist to build patterns, as do many other tools a poet will use, and by operating these tools in a particular way, by creating repetition and variation, a writer is creating expectations, as well as prodding specific sensory experiences in ways that might lend an emotional meaning. The structure of the language is a scaffold that carries meaning. In a formal poem, that scaffold gives the poet something to work with, and the success of the poem is often about how it manages that interaction.
The poems I am writing are not formal, but I think that some of the way in which they work is built upon an understanding that music is a way of making the shape for an argument. The language is, in part, able to imply meaning even when the content is ambiguous, by using sentence structures that have resonance, and by building the shape of an argument or revelation.
I am certain this is not clear, as I am not yet certain of it, but I do know that just beginning to contemplate these ideas here, in this way, with an explicit intent towards unpacking the current trajectory of my work into a clear and conscious understanding is something that I am drawn to now. It can, of course, be a bit dangerous to do that kind of looking, to investigate how things are working, but I find, for myself at least, that when the urge to understand things becomes strong in this way, it is a good sign. It means that I am ready to really understand my current work in a way that will open me up to using these ideas in new and even more exciting ways.
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