Geekin' out on poetry (and Romanticism)—my study thread

They said the ancient Greeks were able to have a Dionysus figure and worship it at times, only because they already lived in a very rigidly structured society (very Apollonian). If you don't then don't go invoking the god of darkness, dissolution, drunken revelry, the destruction of form (including the human body), and madness, Maenads, and the melting away of boundaries. You only want him when you already live hemmed in by boundaries and limits (hmmm—like living in a city surrounded by walls and rules?).

I ran across the same idea several times last night in the articles I found about free verse—it doesn't work as just absolute freedom, it needs to be an escape from form, from something like traditional poetic forms and meter and rhyme scheme. If you haven't absorbed those things and become frustrated with their restriction, you aren't ready to free yourself from them. You don't have the proper motivation—the need to break away.

Remember the old game I've mentioned several times in here, where children tie a pebble to a string and spin it around their heads? You pay out string and see how far you can get it out there. But neither the pebble nor the string alone could do it—without the string the pebble would just fall to the ground. Without the weight of the pebble and centrifugal force the string won't spin out very far, if at all.

The string is the form, and the pebble is the rebellion against it. And every great work of art has both of these elements.

​

This is from the article I linked to at the bottom of the previous page:

"Morrison appeals in his lament for understanding, for a consensus that technology and so-called progress is not necessarily better or more exciting than the mythically imbued past:

Let’s reinvent the gods, all the myths
of the ages
Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests . . .
We have assembled inside this ancient
& insane theatre
To propagate our lust for life
& flee the swarming wisdom
of the streets . . .
I’m sick of dour faces
Staring at me from the T.V.
Tower. I want roses in
My garden bower; dig?"
​

This has been the lament of so many poets and artists of all kinds. Creatives. Not all of them of course, but the Romantics, the ones who share Coleridge's secondary imagination to a high enough degree—which means they can access the unconscious through imagination. That's the source of myth and religion (in the original form, not the concretized church rituals that contain only dim memories of the living world of myth and religion and spirituality).

He was wrong about one thing. Myth isn't something from the past, it's always alive inside every one of us. You need only find ways to connect with it. So many try it through drugs and alcohol and living that wild, free hedonistic life so celebrated by all the Beats and the Romantics and the Decadents and the rock stars. That's a false way in. Psychedelics can give you a way in, but it's a door that might open on heaven or hell, and it can cause permanent damage. Far better to use the long road—the approaches known to allow access. Meditation, remembering and paying close attention to your dreams, getting into the flow state through creative activity. Using a lot of metaphor and simile and symbolism (these are the language of the unconscious). Reading visionary poetry and literature, and occasionally a movie will come pretty close (maybe Apocalypse Now or Mulholland Drive or a few more). Do as much as you can to enter into communion with it. It's always there, always running, even in most stages of sleep. It's just that the conscious mind is boisterous and loud and drowns its quiet subtle voice out. You need to find techniques to quiet the conscious mind, and listen to the calm quiet voice. It isn't literally a voice (though maybe it could be at times), that's a metaphor. It means shut down the conscious mind, at least to an extent—enough so the murmurings of the unconscious come through (another metaphor). It's a stream of thoughts. They can arrive in many forms—visual, auditory, dreams, sudden visions, inspiration, gut feelings, intuition, and doubtless many more. You can access it while writing, you just need to learn to not take too much conscious control. It's a matter of letting the passenger drive. Letting the characters do what they will, rather than forcing them to act out your script. Let them be like RDJ on Iron Man, who famously crumpled up the script, threw it at the wall and said "I'm not repeating this garbage." And as a result, we got a really good movie, one of the best in the MCU. Improv.

All that Stanislavski stuff I've been learning is perfect for getting into communion with the unconscious—it seems to be what it's aimed at. And when you do that, the inner myths come alive.

• Free verse @ HellenicaWorld

I found this while searching for any online articles on free verse by H T Kirby-Smith, author of the book two posts above this one. I'm utterly fascinated by his writing on the subject.

I thought the name looked familiar, and after a moment I realized—if you go to the first page of this blog entry, he wrote the prosody tutorial that begins on a series of eye-searing brilliant green, yellow and purple pages alive with spinning twitching widgets like some Myspace or Geocities site from the early 2000's. There was an interesting article I found through it about a group of poets who adamantly hated free verse and wrote extensively about how terrible it was. One of them was William Carlos Williams, who would eventually become world renouned for his free verse poetry. But apparently he included some forms of invisible or concealed structure that put restrictions in place and made his poetry something unique. Interesting.

Bought American Free Verse: The Modern Revolution in Poetry. Wish it covered the pre-American periods too. But I guess the above book covers that.

Just about to order The Origins of Free Verse by H. T. Kirby-Smith. Right in the Sample there's already discussion of Coleridge's conception of the Romantic Imagination and several other topics that choke-slammed my attention. In a good way I mean.

I also ordered The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within by Stephen Frye, as recommended by Socks Fox.

• Jim Morrison—A "Serious" Poet? @ Literary Kicks

The beginning of this article confirms what I thought I remembered—that the book connecting Morrison and Rimbaud was pretty pedestrian, especially in its exploration of Morrison. But yeah, maybe it got me interested in Rimbaud, and the rest of the French Symbolists.

And damn! The article is intense, and excellent. And long! I'm not quite halfway through it. Powerful stuff!

At Thundair's urging (and endorsed by Socks Fox) I dug out Mary Oliver's Poetry Handbook and am reading through it. It covers much of the very familiar territory, but also some really excellent stuff I haven't seen mentioned in other books. And I decided I wanted a nice book covering lots of poets, so I ordered one called 150 Most Famous Poems.

All this new activity is me preparing to launch into my new area of study—free verse and the prose poem. Once I really get going I'll start a new Poetry blog entry. No way will I keep scrolling back a couple of pages every time I want to make a post.

I've ordered paperbacks of The Flowers of Evil (Le Fleurs du Mal) by Baudelaire, and a book containing A Season in Hell, The Drunken Boat, and Illuminations by Rimbaud. Whenever I've bought Kindle books of poetry I always regret it, because there's no way to mark pages so you can open right to a favorite. Kindle is good for simply reading something, but not for poetry or research books, where you need to be able to quickly flip through and find what you want.

Unfortunately I got the Jim Morrison book in Kindle version. And once past the beginning there's been a lot of stuff I don't like, with mostly one or two words per line, occasionally three. Much of what's included seem to be poetic doodles or early sketches of ideas, sometimes just single words or a line that he wanted to remember for a possible future poem. And there are photographs of journal pages that, in the Kindle, are tiny and impossible to read. If I open it on the computer I'll be able to read those. So far I'm not very pleased with the book, though I expect some parts to be much better. I only wish I could flip through it to quickly find those parts, rather than needing to read through it all page by page, which is the curse of the Kindle.

• 10 of the Best Free Verse Poems Everyone Should Read
• 48 of the Best Free Verse Poems From Contemporary Poets
• The Best Prose Poetry

I went a-searching and could only find a small book by Baudelaire, one brief poem called "Invitation to the Voyage." It's a thing of beauty, with gorgeous sepia photographs and only a few lines of poetry on each page, surrounded by lots of space. And the poetry is very nice. But I no longer seem to have the rest of the books I remember by the French symbolists. I think I'll re-acquire Rimbaud's Illuminations, said to be the launching-point of the prose poem and some of the best examples of it. Prose poetry uses strong imagery and a lot of rhetorical/literary/poetic devices. For many of the writers (of both free verse and prose poetry I think) the King James Bible is a major source.

My ultimate aim is to write a lyric novella.

• Yes, Bruce Springsteen Counts as Poetry
• The Dark Dreams of The Doors, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud

I suppose what I'm doing with these recent posts is bringing poetry down to earth, from the lofty literary heights and the academic ivory towers to the streets. Also this music is a lot more familiar to me than most poetry.

I'm also starting a move into free verse/prose poetry. Morrison's poetry has a great cadence and rhythym to it, better than what I've run across elsewhere.

I have a few books on the French symbolists—Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine. They were the rock stars of their day, just as Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were of theirs. I also have a book linking Morrison specifically with Rimbaud. These books were 90's acquisitions, when I was making a big move into studying some intellectual-type subjects.

Bruce Springsteen on Bob Dylan, from Springsteen's autobiography:

"Bob Dylan is the father of my country. Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were not only great records, but they were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived. The darkness and light were all there, the veil of illusion and deception ripped aside. He put his boot on the stultifying politeness and daily routine that covered corruption and decay. The world he described was all on view, in my little town, and spread out over the television that beamed into our isolated homes, but it went uncommented on and silently tolerated. He inspired me and gave me hope. He asked the questions everyone else was too frightened to ask, especially to a fifteen-year-old: “How does it feel… to be on your own?” A seismic gap had opened up between generations and you suddenly felt orphaned, abandoned amid the flow of history, your compass spinning, internally homeless. Bob pointed true north and served as a beacon to assist you in making your way through the new wilderness America had become. He planted a flag, wrote the songs, sang the words that were essential to the times, to the emotional and spiritual survival of so many young Americans at that moment.

"I had the opportunity to sing “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” for Bob when he received the Kennedy Center Honors. We were alone together for a brief moment walking down a back stairwell when he thanked me for being there and said, “If there’s anything I can ever do for you…” I thought, “Are you kidding me?” and answered, “It’s already been done.” "​

Both are considered important poets as well as songwriters.

I've been reading over earlier parts of this thread, brushing up on things that have faded a bit (or a lot) in my memory since I started it (about a year ago). Three quarters of the way down page 5 I re-discovered this link:

• Supernovae and Dark Stars: Some Notes on Universality in the Lyric Poem

This is really great stuff! It goes into detail about what it means that lyric poetry moves from the particular to the universal, or from the personal to the archetypal (or vise versa). And to get a real taste of how it's done by a great poet, I dug out Leaves of Grass and am reading through Song of Myself, one of the poems mentioned in the article. It's a long one, I'm taking it in chunks.

This is exactly the kind of more intermediate stuff I want to be concentrating on now.