OK, no destruction necessary, but it's always a good time for a Ghostbusters quote. Anyway, I had an interesting experience this week while revisiting a poem that I got stuck on a few months ago. When I looked back at it with fresh eyes, I realized that I hadn't been making progress because I was working on the wrong thing. I was tweaking line breaks and the arrangement of individual words, but I didn't even have a solid form or overall structure yet. I had my cart before the horse. Aha! I decided to temporarily remove the line breaks so I could focus on the overall flow of images and ideas without distraction. I treated my poem like prose: instead of stanzas and freely-broken lines, I wrote paragraphs of complete sentences, and everything started snapping into place. Turns out, I didn't need those line breaks at all--my concept worked better as prose microfiction than as a poem. That was the form I needed. So, first off, woohoo! But now I'm curious. How do the rest of you figure out what form a piece needs to take? I imagine there's a lot of intuition and experience involved, but perhaps some of you have figured out some principles or guidelines. And even if not, I suspect there's some interesting discussion to be had.
I had to walk away from this to ponder first. It seems to be about the goal, rather than form. So, atp, the answer would be more questions: Share an image? Convey a thought? Express a feeling, a vision, an epiphany? Like any art, it's all expression. Is your vision busy, or sublime? Write what's in your head for you. It may point, take a form on its own, or ask for a form. Then all you do is write down what you 'see' in a way we can understand without getting lost. Now, if only I could do that. I tried writing two paragraphs about what was in my story. I couldn't finish even one. Then I took every thought/idea/subject down to three/four-word chunks, each on its own line, and left them like puzzle pieces. Soon I had page upon page, and the pieces were starting to clump on their own. Between each piece was a question, so I wrote piece and question until I needed a timeline. About ten or so cryptic pages later, I was madly trying to keep up with the pieces going together. I had not written a single sentence, yet. That was when it demanded to be a novel. Twenty-six chapters and 200+kW later, I'm still writing questions in the margins. Full sentences, now! Yay! Now I just need to figure out what a paragraph and chapter break is! God forbid it from being an epic poem
It is a tricky thing, isn't it? I, too, had to walk away to ponder your response for a bit. And I think that in my specific case the problem was that at first I wasn't clear on what I was trying to do. That probably has a lot to do with the fact that the piece grew out of some very strong emotions and I just wanted to get them down at first. I was out for a walk when I had a vision of a brief scene and the feelings it would evoke in the narrator, which would echo the feelings I was having at the time. I tend to associate that type of concentrated emotion with poetry, so that's naturally how I tried to express it. It wasn't a conscious choice, though; like I said, I wasn't really clear on what I was doing at the time. It took some time away from the piece to really settle my mind on what I wanted to express, and by then a more basic structure just seemed to suit it. Of course, it could also be that I'm just not a good enough poet yet to really bring out the vision that I had during that walk. I do still struggle with lineating free verse in general. Maybe if I revisit the piece again in another year, it will all come to me. I don't know, but I muddle on.
For me, mood is the ultimate decision maker when it comes to poetry or prose, lyrical rhyme or abstract free form. I think the lesson here though is to be open to experimenting. By reformatting your piece, you found a better structure than what you had in mind in the first place. Sure, it would be nice to be able to set out with a scheme in mind and fit whatever you have on your brain into the meter without a hitch, but I say screw it. If it fits a rigid meter, great; if it flows better in free form, go for it, and if it ends up making better prose, embrace some punctuation and forget about making it a poem at all.
