Narrative parables told in verse are a dying breed in the age of internet poetry. I'm not talking about a single poem that tells one specific story that is over and done. I'm talking about story chains, each piece a link to two more pieces, like the woven ropes that Spartacus and his rebels used to descend the cliffs escape the Roman legions. Fragments and classic forms, a Mad Hatter's playlist of styles and verses, but always the denizens vibrantly and violently alive. In the traditions of works like Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Jabberwocky, and Where the Sidewalk Ends, it is chaos brought to order on the Monarch's wings. It isn't neat or tidy, it is like the rampant bluebell and ivy that twin and twist to spread and flourish across the face of maritime and temperate regions. In all the years I've been writing, both online and in the real world, I have never come across anything else quite like what I do with my Strangeways to Nowhere. These pieces stand apart and oddly alone not only for their hybrid style, but in their complexity. It is the complexity and interconnected creatures, characters, refrains, and forms that has a tendency to scare the living hell out of other people. I witnessed it first hand when I laid these narrative chains out for my thesis presentation. When seen with only two or three pieces, the poems look like nonsense, very well constructed nonsense, but still nonsense, but when combined as a whole, sestinas, Toxic White, the Wild Dogs of Tenebrous Wold, the Glass Girls, and the Gentlemen of the Sleeping Sands, forming the major core story roots because these pieces need to be the strongest, the most detailed and concise, the breadth of the project becomes very clear. It is an epic of epics. Not just a single quest, but multiple tales within tales akin to the Arabian Nights. The pieces wind down to the event horizon of T'dore and his Monarch and the loss of the Star Socks Fox. It is the written embodiment of an autistic stim and a visual representation of the divergence's signature pattern seeking predilections. While other writers might venture a short distance down Alice's rabbit hole, I have a Gannet that can bend space time and reality. A rabbit who can create whole new realms and banish demons, as well as a boy who defies the edicts of his promise to Death to save unicorns and selkies. It is akin to listening to Symphonic Metal (e.g. Nightwish)...way too heavy, drunkenly melodic, and 'hits the nervous system like a hammer', (yes, that last one was a direct quote from a reader). By the definitions of style, metre, and modernity, what I do is a bastardization of everything formal education teaches us poetry should be. I've never met another poet who writes to the zero point of an epic and then does a reverse spiral out of the event horizon. Astrophysics in verse. It is akin to the molecular reorganization of the Mutara Nebula after the detonation of the Genesis torpedo. Life generating matter... The high fantasy epic novels are the closest kin I've found in story structure, but that is because it is hero's journey and the archetype translates across multiple mediums be it prose, music, art, or poetry. It comes down to the archetypal patterns that tessellate across just about every facet of creativity, innovation, and ideology. Life generating matter, the patterns within patterns that most folks don't notice because they work along a straight line, solely linear progression. A to B, and never even think what is Q - 2? It is still possible to reach point B, but please don't expect me to show you the work as to how I got there. It is an event horizon whirlpool on the wings of a Monarch. What are your thoughts on epics and writing style?
