Immediately below this entry is another of my attempts at formal verse. I'll talk more in a moment about how well I think I succeeded, but I want to begin by considering the seeds of this poem.
Originally, this was going to be a personal essay reflecting on an actual event. I was not involved in an accident, but it was only because the car on my left was not driving like a runaway train. A matter of random moments separated me from a multi-car pile-up on I-40 West. Unlike the poem at hand, the essay would have meditated on the nature of life after death. In other words, it might have ended up being like the apocrophal writing in which one of the apostles returns from death and reports on the exact circumstances of the afterlife. My essay certainly would have shared more with that slight work than it would have with Dante's Divine Comedy.
I started trying to write this essay on Monday. The way I sometimes work is to type drafts in my e-mail program at home, then e-mail them to a work addy or directly to the blog (very appreciated feature in the latest version of Blogger). Then, as time and work allows, I can play with, and hone, the draft. I was running out of time Monday morning, so I quickly wrote the phrase: "I died on Saturday. But I digress." Well, the curiousness of that second statement caught my attention, and it lead me into another direction entirely. The fact that it was a non-sequitor tempted me to think about writing a poem.
Things have moved fairly slowly from there. It's been a relatively busy week, both at home and at work, and I've had little time to work on this poem. Well, that's not 100% accurate; I did write two quatrains based on the theme and opening line, then dumped them without saving. A couple of turns of phrase and rhyme I wish I had hung onto, but now lost to the ether.
You may notice I mentioned that this discarded draft was written in quatrains. Well, it just so happened that I was literally driving on I-40 West, which rhymes with "digress". Rhyming couplets seem inappropriate for a "graveyard" poem of this sort, so I immediately considered the classic ABAB rhyme scheme.
Whoops! Meant to write a sonnet, and this only has ten lines. I know there's other defects here (Mike Snider would no doubt point out the irregular meter), but that's certainly the first one to be tackled. So, now it goes back into the "work-in-progress" pile. Phooey.
But, let's continue considering what we have so far, shall we? The basis of my line is ten syllables. Yes, I'm aware line seven depends on eliding "toward" into "t'ward", and line eight is twelve syllables. I'm not terribly concerned about the Okie elision of "t'ward", even the afore-mentioned Mike has claimed some interesting pronounciations (sorry, appropriate link is not close to hand). I am more troubled by those twelve syllables in line eight. Now that I've realised I've got four more lines to go, I can dismantle the last two stanzas and stretch out the plot a bit more.
Now, here's my reasoning with that ten syllable thing: Chaucer and Shakespeare chose iambic pentameter, so I've been told, because that is the rhythm of everyday speech. Therefore, if I write an average of ten syllables per line, I'm bound to hit an iamb now & again.
This may seem like laziness, but everytime I've tried to screw my mind up to sound like Dracula, it comes out flat. I'm more likely to sound like me, in other words, if I focus on the syllable count than strict meter. Mike would possibly argue that I might find I could write in other voices (like Frost's Handy Man) if I worked more on the meter. Maybe. I suspect keen psychological empathy and observation have a lot to do with that sort of verse; perhaps more so than meter.
In any case, I think any kind of discipline will serve to lead the poet in new directions. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, for example, impose all sorts of curious limits on themselves. The product may not suit my tastes any more than it does Mike's, but I respect their attempt at a discipline. Though I suspect said poets might object to the term "discipline"; it is not a term I recognize from Ron Silliman's poetics.
So, for now, the syllable count and rhyme scheme are sufficient discipline for me. I have written a few syllabic "personae" poems, "At The Cafeteria" being the most recent. The restrictions of the octologue form did move me toward brevity (similar to my haiku experiments) that I think is effective (at least, in this instance).
So - back to the woodshed. Throw "train/lane" on the scrap-heap along with that unwieldy 12-syllable line, see if I can end up building a more elegant police accident report.
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