Filling out forms
Should there be a test required to get a poetic license? I've been reading all I can find about different forms of literature. Perhaps it's the engineer in me, but I'm of the mind that in order to deviate from formalism well, you need to understand formalism. Writing should be deliberate, not accidental.
In my searches I've come across a lot of poetry on the internet. Some of it is quiet lovely. So much more of it is not. Far too much of it is free verse. Not that free verse is necessarily bad, there's been a lot of wonderful free verse published, but whatever happened to meter and rhyme?
I could probably slap together some free verse and call it poetry, but I want to understand what I'm doing. I want to craft my work, not simply let it spill from my pen onto paper. Does doing that inhibit creativity, or enhance it? Does it take more creativity to shape your feeling to fit a form? Does it take extensive knowledge of the various forms to allow me to choose a form suited to my ideas?
Formal poetry is work; no question about it. It's not something I, personally, can do off the cuff. It's a very deliberate act of shaping expression, but that's what I think makes it so much greater: it's not just the idea being expressed, but the form it takes, and that adds to the expression.
Am I ready to try my hand at formal poetry? Maybe. But I think I may need to find my feet first.
In my searches I've come across a lot of poetry on the internet. Some of it is quiet lovely. So much more of it is not. Far too much of it is free verse. Not that free verse is necessarily bad, there's been a lot of wonderful free verse published, but whatever happened to meter and rhyme?
I could probably slap together some free verse and call it poetry, but I want to understand what I'm doing. I want to craft my work, not simply let it spill from my pen onto paper. Does doing that inhibit creativity, or enhance it? Does it take more creativity to shape your feeling to fit a form? Does it take extensive knowledge of the various forms to allow me to choose a form suited to my ideas?
Formal poetry is work; no question about it. It's not something I, personally, can do off the cuff. It's a very deliberate act of shaping expression, but that's what I think makes it so much greater: it's not just the idea being expressed, but the form it takes, and that adds to the expression.
Am I ready to try my hand at formal poetry? Maybe. But I think I may need to find my feet first.
0 comments:
Post a Comment