I am hitting blanks here. Iam not blocked, I wrote things but I myself didn’t liked them or I just did notfinished them. Like many of you said I need some “me” time. And the bully timeruns away after goring me from back. I am not going anywhere during the July 4thlong weekend. Probably that will be the time I will date myself (LOL).
Here is something I wrote along time back to put in my lonelypoet.org website. Some of you who visitedthat site might’ve read this already. This is my view and way of writing.
Enjoy.
Writing Free Verse.
I write my expressions infree verse. That is the best way I can describe my writing. As it was a journeyalone, most of what I learned was self taught, with guidance from books andmany times the works of other writers. I won’t advice anyone to take that pathas I know very well how gruesome that path was for me and how much of struggleI needed to go through. It is always nice to find the nearest poetry group andattend their weekly or monthly poetry workshops. The rewards are far betterthan thinking about a line, a phrase or just an image that you’ve got andtrying to elaborate on that all by yourself. Most of the time it helps to sharethe idea with someone thinking in the same way or someone engaged in doing whatyou are doing.
Now what is free verse? Well if anyone can define it in a paragraph or a bookthen it will lose the “free” part of it. That raises another question. Can itbe called poetry if someone writes with no specific rhythm or rhyme? In myopinion, first of all, an understanding of what is poetry, what kind of toolsare used to compose poetry is very important before starting to attempt toexpress what you see, hear and feel as poetry. In my case all my attempts towrite better led me to be a better reader than I was when I started to read.Poets read poem differently than non-poets. It is true as most of the poets gothrough the poem and first take out the essence of the poem and then try tograsp the structure, rhythm, and then possibly if it is there the actual rhymepattern of the poem. These tools are not often used in free verse. But even infree verse there is rhythm, and to understand the rhythm it is always nice totry to write a parody of the poem of interest. I always try that even though Ilaughed at myself after reading those parodies, it helps to understand thetools the poet used to express what the poet actually felt in the form ofverse.
In my view poetry or the stuff needed to write poetry exists in almost everywhere, it is better to go to an old book shop and buy some poetry anthologies.Anthologies are always better as it will be having poems written by differentwriters and the person who compiled the anthology might have compiled itaccording to subject. If you look at the different subjects you can find thatpoems are written in subject you might not have even imagined. Reading a poemfrom each subject will sets of hundreds of triggers in your brain to write somelike the poems you just read.
Now coming to the preparation, I am not going to tell what you should do. Manypeople have a lot of bad habits, like buying new writing pads, pens, cleaningup the whole place before you sit, keeping some food, coffee, or alcoholaround. I think these are all distractions, but if you are comfortable withsomething just go ahead and get it around. I just don’t do anything, I sit andtake anything I can write and start writing, as I consider that is the mostimportant part of the whole process.
Never shy before others if you feel like writing something, because you maylose the idea in your forgetful mind if you procrastinate. For doing that firstof all most importantly you need accept one fact, that is, you can write.Anyone can write, but everyone doesn’t accept that. Most of the time people mayeven laugh at what you are doing, but it is you who wanted to write and theyare all out there to drag you down from the wall you are climbing. After a fewencounters with those shut out minds you will see a change in their attitude.Even the garbage you write will be hailed as “good work” by those who laughedat you first.
I am not going to quote bits of hundreds of poems here for you. Browse aroundthere are hundreds of poetry sites from published poets to new aspiring ones.Just browse and find out the kind of poem you like. The style, rhythm,structure, rhyme and anything or everything you wanted to add are all as Isaid, additions. The main thing you should be concerned about is the subjectyou are writing and the images you are using in that subject. It is importantto stay within the subject and write with clarity. What I told is veryimportant as real poets are a minority in this world and most of the time youwork is going to be read by people who just want to grab it all in a singlereading. Abstraction is good, but if you leave the reader confused at the endof the poem, that reader is not going to read another work of yours. So keepthese two things in mind when you start to write.
In my way and view I will just write whatever that comes in my mind. Contraryto what I said, to stay in the subject I ask you to write it as much aspossible. If it is a new person you just met you are writing about, then writeabout the appearance, the color of the skin, hair, eyes, the smell of theperfume or cologne, the type and color of the dress, shoes and every singlemove you can remember that person made. This is very important as when youelaborate you can find those small observations helping you to get a biggerimage. It is in your second draft where you eliminate all the unnecessarythings you wrote in the first draft. What I do after that may interest you, Iwill just leave the poem to either rot there in my pad or ripe into something Ican love everlastingly. This is just my way, it helped me a lot in finding outif I did the right thing by writing about something. I will take what I wrotemay be a week later and read it aloud, and try to get the same feeling andpassion when I first wrote the poem. If it does nothing I will just leave it ina folder. You may end up with hundreds of folders before you take one and holdit to your chest patting your own cheek about the wonderful piece of work youdid.
There are no hurries in doing what you wanted to do as poems come from theminds of every age.
