Poets: Fear your Creativity’s Running Dry?

In my free-verse days, up until ‘02, more often than not I’d feel so dry I had nothing to say. I had to take a walk to generate inspiration. Plus, it bugged me that most of my poems, which tended to be “nature poems” looked alike and sounded alike — over and over only slight variations on the same theme which never seemed to advance or develop anything new beyond itself.

Looking back at the 40 or so poems I’d published, I felt embarrassed (none of them made it into my first book). With the help of Timothy Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing,” (Great book!) I taught myself to write in meter. But blank verse wasn’t enough by itself.

In the middle of a poem I stumbled onto a “random potentials” strategy (sounds like modern physics, doesn’t it?) which “cornered” and “tracked” like the first front-wheel drive automobile I ever drove: It didn’t fishtail! I wanted to experience more of that! I bought a copy of Sue Young’s New Comprehensive American Rhyming Dictionary.

This rhyming strategy opened up a whole range of new feeling and new tactics for writing poems. Meter and Rhyme together became the twin anchor lines to a wholly new source of creativity I didn’t at all suspect might lie inside of me — and to new poems that expressed it.

What, besides desperation, turned the trick for me? More next time.

Meanwhile, are there any of you poets in cyberspace who fear your creativity is running dry? What do you do about it?

Any readers out there who feel the poets you are reading, or used to read, have run dry?

Please share your story or comments. Thank you.

Leland

How Did Poetry Get Where It Is?

It’s been over a hundred years since French poets, and then their English counterparts, threw over, as a temporary exercise, the use of meter and rhyme. They complained that its romantic subjects (especially the Rose) and the idiotic sing-song way poetry was recited back then, were totally irrelevant to life. I would agree if I had lived back then.

World War I brought most romantic poets to complete despair. Ezra Pound and especially T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams captured poets’ imaginations, and every poet living today knows in a general way the rest of the story.

In the latter part of the 20th century, MFA style free verse, often filled with critical allusions only academics could catch, and often written more to elicit critical analysis from other academics than to give the ordinary reader pleasure, became the dominant mode for poetry.

Today poetry readers are a small minority of all readers. There may be, in fact, more poets than readers. The urge to make poetry is a deeply felt one we all experience as children but seem, for the most part, to “grow out of” by adulthood, when for most people, it becomes a “lost art.”

Timothy Steele has written, I think, the definitive work on the recent history of meter and rhyme, Missing Measures, subtitled “Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter.” It’s well-worth reading. In the meanwhile, I’d like to ask you who choose to comment a question or two:

Whatever happened, in your opinion, to meter and rhyme such that it could not, or has not yet, reasserted itself despite a tradition older than Shakespeare?

Why are so few people reading poetry today, including non-academic free verse?

I’ll share with you some ideas I have, in another posting. But first, let’s hear from you!

Leland