I will end this piece with a question to all of you – or I could make it a challenge, which would be much more fun, of course.
First though, a personal observation. When I started writing poems – and I started quite late, when I was 28 or thereabouts – I knew almost nothing about the field. I had this vague idea that poetry needed to be both cryptic and melodic. Easy on the ears & eyes but quite hard on the mind. Most of my first efforts were jazzy and obscure.
Later, I grew tired of this. I'm an instinctive storyteller and I decided that there was no reason why you couldn't do that in poems too. I also came to a (personal) conclusion that I enjoyed clarity more than obscurantism. Of course, I like similes and other tools of the poetic trade but I've grown a bit weary of all those multi-syllabic, three dollar words when there are so many much easier and perfectly okay two penny options.
I'm not suggesting poets should dumb down. (Hell, I'm not suggesting anyone does anything anyway.) It's just that I'm not sure it's necessary to have one dictionary with prose words and one with more poetic ones.
It's a matter of taste, of course but, to give one example from the world of prose, I actually prefer the very common & clear language Stephen King uses in his horror stories to the flowery & Gothic language of Poe or Lovecraft. Again, that's mostly a matter of taste but still – and here's my question: If you could, in a poem, tell the same 'story' as easily in a simple, direct way as in a deliberately complicated manner, which option would you go for?
For instance, a bit earlier today, I posted this poem – a quite simple story of someone longing for the absent lover.. This was it:
Longing for rain
I have not become the heron,
leaving my body on the shore,
(Leonard Cohen)
The herbs are doing well,
on my small balcony.
It's raining now,
after a week of sun,
when I had to water them
each day.
I don't know why I'm
writing this to you -
maybe I am homesick.
Maybe, like those herbs,
I long for rain.
After I finished that one, I started a few other poems – sometimes, I just like to spend time going at certain themes from different sides. Like Cézanne and his bloody mountain. (Though I prefer the term 'doodling' when I talk about what I do.) Anyway, nothing much happened. Just some not very useful images and phrases. (That's the problem with starting with something as simple – and I think elegant – as the image of a few potted herbs on a small inner city balcony: It's not such an easy act to follow.)
One of the efforts I immediately wanted to destroy was the following poem. Not because I thought it was truly bad but because it, in essence, told the same story but in a slightly too elaborate and fancy way. So, here's that poem:
Long fall
“In the long willow branches, the dark cypress,
my own ghost hides, stares out at me,”
(Moniza Alvi)
It's a long fall,
in the darkness, leaking from
the time between each
ringing of the bells,
to where the eyes seek out
the worlds beyond the cracked map,
painted on the ceiling:
A long way back to you, my love.
Now, my question again: What do you prefer: the prosaic or poetic – the herbs or the cracked ceiling, as it were?
That challenge I mentioned earlier?
