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

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

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

​

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.