Poetry's Easy and Prose is Powerful: Srsly (My heart was 3)
#5 of Srsly
Poetry's Easy and Prose is Powerful: Srsly (My heart was 3)
Writing poetry is really easy, it's all about feelings! Everybody has feelings to express, right? So pick up that keyboard and...
3. Write formless shapeless purely expressive text that is complete dreck.
Poetry is an artform that is essentially about playing tricks with prose for a beautiful effect. The reason I bring it up is because it highlights something very interesting. People think they know how to write poetry. They go, 'ohh, I write in free verse! :3' and then everyone with half a clue just switches off, expecting them to hack up their text at random with no form or structure or anything and just call it 'Free Verse'. Free verse is the deconstruction of poetry's many forms and methods to produce beautiful text.
Going at free verse first under the assumption it's easy is like assuming that rollerblading is precisely like walking. The only difference is, poetry doesn't give you a broken ankle if you fuck up.
You wanna write pretty prose? You need to be on at least nodding terms with poetry. This won't tell you about poetry. Poetry is big and complex and you need to try writing it yourself, just don't gabble randomly and call it 'Free Verse'. Try to make it rhyme. Because rhyme is one of the very few things prose can do.
What prose cannot do is describe anything. Don't believe me? Okay. Let's assume I am describing something to you for the first time. You've never encountered this thing in your life, but somehow I will describe it to you with text. Here goes!
'Red.'
How about another one?
'Hot.'
One more!
'Pain.'
Golly. That's problematic. You know how people may have told you that anything film can do, a novel can do better? Well a film can definitely describe 'Red' to you, but it's going to have trouble with 'Hot' and 'Pain' - although it can show you people experiencing heat and pain.
There are plenty of things prose cannot ever do. Language is too limiting. But what it can do you want to exploit fully. Poetry's been trying for a few hundred - technically thousand - years, but if you're going to go 'All I need is Free Verse' you're about to rollerblade yourself into a dead end you will never drag yourself out of.
Prose, as a form, is intrinsically tied to language. Language is messy and organically developed. If you are going to use it effectively, you must learn the limitations and the various tricks. One is Synaesthesia - 'That's a loud shirt, Tom.' 'I'm feeling blue...' Why this works, nobody knows.
But you'll learn about that trick, and many more... in poetry. Or by paying attention to beautiful prose - which some would argue, even if it's in the form of a novel, is poetry.
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That means you can do whatever the hell you want with Srsly, from ripping it off entirely to 'quoting' it in your own guide to rewriting it. Please feel free and encouraged to make copies for your writing newsletter, blog, or anything at all. If you would like to link back to me, which is nice and polite but by no means compulsory, please use 'http://www.furaffinity.net/user/foozzzball/' or my e-mail address, [email protected]'.