CREATIVITY

The Essential Elements of Poetry Aren’t Essential

But finding your dancing shoes is

Lines we call poetry drip with imagery like wax from a candle and ignite us as we write them, but what is really happening and why…?

Writing poetically feels like clambering up into an attic space with just a glint of light splicing the dust-heavy air, and then turning around, slowly, wondering what to uncover. Blankets are touched, woolen and rough, just there to protect. Boxes teetering too high, ripped down one side where you’ve been up before and remembered. Quick! Before that call to come back down the ladder: rummage and ransack - those letters, those people, those dancing shoes tidied away and stacked…

I am in that attic now and I love the pulse of potential poetry under my fingertips, but hey, I want to run on in prose, slip words into little play towers, not in a pattern or under any rule or law, but just together in a place, like I’ve run my hands over soil and piled it up and planted something.

Open a book and tell me that there are rules for this dance, and I will let go of your hand and spin across the floor to that shady corner where you can’t see me, and I’ll write disobediently, against metric, and verse, and anything that has a look-me-up in the dictionary definition.

Because don’t take the life blood from it all with mention of sustained design, or pentameter, or formalization. I would rather fly wrong, and knock the leaves off convention, than curl up small to fit in an egg I know is made for cracking.

If I like a poem with s.t.r.u.c.t.u.r.e it’s because it’s a frame for a feeling that your words made me feel. You’ve stood in front of me as though I were blind, and seen for me a world shot through with colors that are promises of better to come. Titbits and tantalizers. Hem of a garment that passed by — did you see it? I turned my head for a moment while your words framed my gaze, and I saw it. Rich, free-wheeling fabric, sparking and blinding, and ooh, I wanted to gather it up and wrap it around us and bow my head under the weight — but it passed, and we’re here, and I hear you. I see what you see.

Your structure is you and your words are guidelines, alignments and counterpoints, and (did you know?) as you write, you speak into life and transfer a load that I’ll share, for a time, and I’ll feel it, make it mean something, peer down into the colors that you’ve reflected and bounced into being.

Because, oh! Poetry is that gathering place of all those corners of writing that we’ve snipped off from larger pages. Pages we dragged under our arm, down the street, to the bus stop. We bundled them up the step, past the driver, the passengers; we lowered our gaze and pretended the giant sheets were important, or not there, or both. We collapsed on a seat and cradled our pages, arms asunder and our hair in our eyes. We were windswept on a windless day and the world laughed, or looked out the window, pressed up closer to the glass, and slid away.

So we took out our scissors and we sat and we snipped and we cut away the smallest parts that would fit in our pockets and we hid them there like half-sucked sweets. We snipped away in the noisy silence of bus doors opening and closing, the bumpety-bump of feet in and out and right through us. We forgot the shambles of what we were doing, our feet tucked under our seat as we straightened, brushed that strand from our lips, and worked away, pocketing pieces of paper, faster and faster as the bus moved slower, and slower.

Pell-mell beauty. Parts of a whole. A dialogue of dissonance hugged up and loved.

Oh! — is that you, climbing up the ladder into the attic? Is that you reaching up to pull yourself into a place where life is hoarded and static? Where it needs you to displace it, move it, drag it into a nook where the light is enough to find wonder and newness and meaning; where even if you make that meaning with corner clippings pieced together into tottering towers that a child could huff and puff down, you could still see that hem, unexpectedly, out the corner of your eye, in all its fullness —

You could write a poem. You could.

And if you are now in the mood for poetry, do read this beautiful nugget of a poem by Annie Avery whose first language isn’t English and I don’t know how she does it:

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