Why Poetry?

[scribblemyname]

The truth is I love the music of language and a prose story ended up as a narrative poem of 124 lines ("Queen of Heaven"), even though I knew perfectly well that I wanted to write out a piece of fiction.

And suddenly, I'm knuckling my way through sheets and sheets of this stuff that's just been rejected so free to post or never got finished or has simply been hiding out on my hard drive while I figured out which of my pen names got to claim it. It seems I always do my poetry in sprees and here I am spreeing away when I've got novelettes to write and finish.

A lot of it is when I need to sketch and have that sketch be a finished piece. Weird, huh? I've written a lot of story sketches. They are patently unsharable. And these poems, some of them I can't even label lyric or narrative 'cause they're telling a story but that story is a whole lot of a bigger picture than what I can cram into those narrow 13, 16, 18 lines or what have you.

And sometimes it makes me wonder how much of these stories that I'm capturing, grappling with are just like all those other poems we read from poets talking about their own lives, their own stories. The poem strips away the standard narrative to that vital part that's part of the poet. It teases the reader with the universal aspects of a tale and hides the detail in its carefully crafted words, revealing and disguising in equal amounts.

I can dig into the worlds this way, and it's surprisingly high level. I can hit the broad points and the infinitely, intimately personal and show in just a line, a half a line how they interrelate. It's freeing and awesome and bewildering at once. But I'm having fun.

Do you write poetry? Have you ever used it to tell a story?

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Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[pygmymuse.livejournal.com]

I am not a poet, living is the poem
I am not a singer, I am in the song
And I've got a story that I cannot write down
And I'm with you but I'll always be alone
I may not be right, but I don't think I am wrong

~Melanie Safka, "I Am Not a Poet (Night Song)"


Sorry, couldn't resist. ;)

I think it's interesting that you use poetry for story planning. I've never done that. I'm always letting the characters tell the story, and I'm just along for the ride, so I don't do a lot of story planning. I also suck at poetry, but it's a really neat idea to use it to summarize/plan out stories.

[scribblemyname]

I never have before, but it sort of happened and I like it. :grins: