CREATIVITY

The Essential Elements of Poetry Aren’t Essential

But finding your dancing shoes is

Let’s dance. Photo by Ardian Lumi on Unsplash (edited)

Lines we call poetry drip with imagery like wax from a candle and ignite us as we write them, but what is really happening and why…?

Writing poetically feels like clambering up into an attic space with just a glint of light splicing the dust-heavy air, and then turning around, slowly, wondering what to uncover. Blankets are touched, woolen and rough, just there to protect. Boxes teetering too high, ripped down one side where you’ve been up before and remembered. Quick! Before that call to come back down the ladder: rummage and ransack - those letters, those people, those dancing shoes tidied away and stacked…

I am in that attic now and I love the pulse of potential poetry under my fingertips, but hey, I want to run on in prose, slip words into little play towers, not in a pattern or under any rule or law, but just together in a place, like I’ve run my hands over soil and piled it up and planted something.

Open a book and tell me that there are rules for this dance, and I will let go of your hand and spin across the floor to that shady corner where you can’t see me, and I’ll write disobediently, against metric, and verse, and anything that has a look-me-up in the dictionary definition.