I stopped being serious

Published on by Grace

 about writing a long time ago. I never wanted to/aspired to being a prose writer, a writer of novels or stories. I always wanted to be a poet.  In 6th grade I declared that as my chosen profession and Mrs. Forlano (you remember her, right?) said “You mean poetess” and I retorted “No, I mean poet, it is a neuter noun” Little ole rebellious me.

I don’t read a lot of new poetry because poetry has changed; it seems to me to be just prose chopped into short sentences. But it also seems that is just me. Yet, one of my favorite newer poems is exactly that – prose in short sentences and yet immediately recognized and experienced as a poem. I’m so confused. 

I always insist that poetry must have meter/rhythm/music; I have always been somewhat dismissive of “prose poetry” and “free verse” – it just doesn’t scan for me (you see what I did there?). There is a lot of crap poetry around the blogosphere – and the mistake I see most people make is – they don’t put in the work. They don’t maintain the imagery or the metaphor. Poetry is damn hard work. Writing is damn hard work – it is not just spewing words on a page. 

I just had an exchange with a friend – she is so talented and gifted with words, language, metaphor. I call her the Empress of Metaphor. Her writing is lush and lovely. I don’t always understand what she is writing about and I don’t care, I just love the way the words flow. She is super smart, well educated and a lot of her references and metaphors go over my head but I get the beauty of them. 

Anyway – she is finally getting ‘serious’ about writing and she said “… but need a bit more discipline and some work around craft.” Craft – she is working on her craft. (Craft: Skill in doing or making something, as in the arts.”)
 
I stopped working on my craft long ago. When I was young I took poetry workshops, I took writing classes, I worked it. I still do when I settle in to write a poem but there’s the rub – the discipline part. That and the fact that I write personal poems. I don’t comment on the world at large or Nature. I only write about how I feel. And most days, these days, I don’t feel much of anything. 
Yet – I’ve talked about this before – I think in quatrains. My thoughts come in poetic form – with rhyme often, certainly with meter. I’ve got rhythm! 
But I have written prose that knocks MY socks off. I read my own stuff and think “Damn, that’s good.” But when it comes to prose I am only a writer of good lines. But my voice is my voice. I write the way I talk. But better because, oh hey, I can edit what I write. You may not realize how much goes into simple, seemingly off-the-cuff posts like this. 
At any rate, I no longer have any pretensions to being a real life ‘professional’ published writer. My goal of having a book of poetry published is long retired. I don’t even consider myself a serious writer. Writing for me now, maybe always has been, is just a form of therapy. I think if I had any kind of social interaction I would write even less than I do now. 
I will always prefer pen and paper to typing – 

14 thoughts on “I stopped being serious”

  1. Poetry is a dying craft, matters not how or which style it is written in either, it is still dying in today's world. Poetry is personal and if others like it and read it, great, if not doesn't really matter one iota. There are good poets, bad poets, crappy poets, there is good, bad, ugly and fugly poetry, there is great and ass bad imagery, music, density, rhythm and line in many poems, but still it will always come down to how people feel and how they express it emotionally, how they verse it, how they eek out the imagery with their chosen words.

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  3. Writing has never been my strong point. My sentences are always a mess and my punctuation is not much better. I sometimes have trouble forming coherent thoughts and an even harder time expressing those thoughts on paper.

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  4. I can't remember a time when I wasn't in love with words – I've never been great with grammar and punctuation – I still look up proper usage – so many words in my head I have to remind myself of their meaning – Everyone expresses themselves in their own way.

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  5. I think I have written some real good stuff here and there, but it was always, I think, something that I had edited and re-written and massaged, deleted and started over, edited some more, etc. It was always very satisfying, but under-appreciated!

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  6. Sometimes it is the “technical” stuff that needs work and sometimes it's the content stuff that needs work but something always needs work, that's why they invented copy editors for the technical stuff, and editors for the content stuff – of course those jobs have gone by the wayside except for the most famous of authors. EVen proofreaders are in short supply (I just fixed a few technical errors in this post – hardly a big deal but they annoyed me). So much gets under-appreciated – even for the rich and famous – let's face it not everything is everyone's cup of tea.

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  7. You must be right about the proofreaders. I don't expect technically good writing on the Internet in general, but I see more and more errors from “real” news sources more and more often. There are a couple of writers working for Fox4 News here in Kansas City who couldn't advance out of the fifth grade if it hinged on their writing. In that case, it's not just technical grammar, as you say, but cohesiveness and ambiguity issues. I have low expectations for most Amazon e-books, as well. Is it ego that keeps people from hiring editors? They just can't believe anything they wrote is clunky or hard to understand? I blame those English teachers who told their students that as far as “rules,” anything goes as long as what they write is understandable. Not everyone is Tom Wolfe! (I know I'm not…)

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  8. Never having read anything by Tom Wolfe I can't relate to that (or did you mean Thomas Wolfe, a brilliant writer whom I have read). Mistakes, often glaring, have always been around sad to say even in the old days of editors, proofreaders et al. I have yet to find a reason why homophone errors are so rampant – they make me nucking futs!

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  11. No, it was not. I shall always identify myself when I comment. I just thought it was funny 😂 -Melissa. See. There will always be a little dash and a Melissa.

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  13. The plain old Tom Wolfe, who wrote The Right Stuff, The Electric KoolAid Acid Test, Bonfire of the Vanities. I thought of him because he is imminently readable and understandable, but–as I recall–not a super-formal, grammatically correct writer

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