some thoughts about writing various poetry forms (or at least, part of what i suspect that it takes to write them well)
omg, thank you, Zev, so much for such enthusiastic response. i think that i have soooo so very much to learn — i aspire to the level of writing i find here, and feel like i am just an infant, babbling amongst a room of bards, poets, and muses! this piece, well, it just, it is real. itʻs some genealogical work iʻve been doing as part of healing, and caused so much, idk, something, that emerged, irresistibly — i didnʻt really put a lot of thought into it. the middle “prose” section failed, as it drifted into some semi-poetry. idk if it squarely falls as poetry, prose, prose poetry, (and i really was striving for a legit haibun), or if it is just sloppy writing. but in the end, i just had to write truth. not just content, but form.
actually, that is probably a cop-out, and why i have such a limited range of forms. iʻve been thinking the past day or so, that the different poetry forms, when mastered, are like a language — they shape how you perceive, think, organize, experience. Just as various languages reflect certain cognitive, philosophical, epistemological, perhaps even moral frameworks and a priori assumptions of experience (for instance, the myriad names of rain and cloud types in Hawaiian, or the word かみ, which actually i find more parallel to aumakua (Hawaiian) than anything i might try to apply from English).
The form i am most comfortably with is haiku, and though not much used so far, tanka (that is just a matter of cracking the whip). i realized that i often experience things, i organize my perceptions, thoughts, and expressions, in haiku format. it is as if i think in haiku, as much as i think in English (or Hawaiian, or Japanese, at given moments).
Try as i might, i have not been able to write other metric or rhymed structures. even if i write something, it lacks truth. i realized yesterday that that is because i donʻt experience and naturally organize my experiences in other forms. it is as if i were to try to write Russian, or Arabic.
i recently undertook the challenge of trying to write a villanelle. i nominally understand the structure, and i think that i had something to express, but it wasn’t anything that i could find conforming to a villanelle way of perceiving and expressing. it was as i couldn’t speak Villanell-ese. The same for sonnet, and the myriad of forms out there — i haven’t learned to recognize and organize my experiences (internal and external) in other formats. i strongly suspect that good villanelle writers recognize things, experience them, express them already packaged in villanelle units, just as i sometimes experience nature, events, kind of automatically in haiku units, so to speak. i suspect the same for sonnets — i think the Bard didn’t labor over how to create sonnets — i can’t help but think that he thought in sonnet, when he composed them, that he wrote his verse sections of his plays as verse, because that is how he experienced them. the same for any of the buzzillions of forms that are out there.
i truly marvel at all of you who can express such (for lack of better word) poetic experience in a variety of forms, and yet not sound like writing exercises, but rather, natural expressions of experiences that took shape in your perception in specific forms (including prose, drama, and the like). To naturally recognize a triolet experience, a cinquain moment, a sonnet state, and to be able to actually compose such an expression allows for so many more experiences, moments to come to light. it requires a fluency in the language of the form.
anyway, that is something i thought yesterday, and hopefully, doesn’t come off as a cop-out. i know that people can be multi-lingual, after much experience and practice. perhaps it is the same with multi-formal poets. and so for me, anyway, i think i have to learn the languages of other forms.
wow, thank you for letting me piggyback on your response with such a random babble!
