What Turned the Trick for Me?

I left this question with a promise of an answer in a prior post. Ken Ingham’s excellent comment about the creative energy unleashed when using meter and rhyme prompted me to return to it.

The desperation I felt, at the poverty of feeling I experienced, was what turned the trick for me. (My dad died just before I turned six. Circumstances conspired to inhibit my sister’s and my grieving our loss. I spent 60 years in “denial.” That blocked areas of feeling. This was, of course, what blocked the poetry.)

The interplay of the musical elements --- of meter’s underlying rhythm, speech-stress in composing, and rhyme’s melodic end-chimes --- exercised for me an extraordinary incantatory power. I can only describe it as healing. It was healing regarding Dad’s death. This put me in touch with feeling levels I’d previously denied. It also burst out the sides of the box of my imagination.

It was a “right-brain” phenomenon which, like a car’s front-wheel drive, pulled me out of the box of my habitual feeling and thinking. How? When composing, I let one of a number of contextually suitable rhyme words, possessing nothing but pure potential (as in modern physics), do the work. Each would pull other images into the line, and bring it out in a new place!

Composing from line to line, following the formal rhyme scheme of the form chosen, the poem would take shape, its content always surprising me. Who else has tried this? Please comment!

Leland