Mostly About Poetry

I went to Starbucks to try to write again. I attempted poetry again, and it was crapful.

Then I wrote this:

Let's try again.
Money money money. :Puke.
I fear the sadness won,
But I continue to hope.
I lost so much
And burned so much
And set fire to myself.
Confusion holds me dear.
Sadness is always near.
My heart is long since stifled.
My mind is atrophied.
My body is fattening and lazy.
My soul is reclusive and weak.
But I do have distant hopes.
I have hopes that whisper
Across the hills like a gentle rain on a sweltering day.
I have complacency combined with contentment.
Fear and frivolity.
Hope and hate.
Sadness and sleepiness.
Excitement with a dash of emptiness.
Pain in my body and pride in my work.
Malaise and mounting momentum.
Expectation of entropy.
Crooked spine and a cracked heart.
Indifference with a hidden hue of insatiability.
Longing and languor.
Playfulness and pissiness.
Contempt and contemplation.
Gratefulness and gusto.
Blankness and boldness.
Procrastination and perturbation.
Video games and vanity.
More writing and a few wounds.
Still no guitar.

Not poetry, but alliteration is a nice start I think.
I think it'll come back.

I have a stomach ache. I'm not sure what I should or should not have eaten.

WATER! I need more water.

Ugh. Now what?

I have plans to write a book on how to write poetry. Poetry tends to suck these days, and I really think there should be some solid advice out there. However, I'm not sure how one would write a whole book on it. I'm amazed that full-sized self-help books are published at all. One of my favorite money siphons was The Purpose Driven Life.
I'm not the best reader on the planet, but I've done my fair share. I tend to favor fiction – fantasy and/or sci-fi especially. Nevertheless, I've read a few biographies, plays, textbooks, etc. When I was little, my dad had a multi-volume encyclopedia; I even read big chunks of that.
I tried my darndest. It received so much hype that I figured there had to be some gems hidden somewhere. I think I made it halfway through The Purpose Driven Life, but I couldn't take it anymore. I think I felt like some people do with a Rubik's cube: they try to figure out how to make sense of it and just end up saying, "Screw it. I've got better ways to waste my time."

Anywho, I guess I could start compiling and see how far it expands. Maybe I could publish a chapbook on how to write poetry.

A few free pointers for you:

• Rhyming is good.
• If you don't like to rhyme – in most cases – it's because your vocabulary is too small and rhyming feels too hard.
• Meter/structure is good.
• Sprawling sentences are ok for when you're warming up, but it typically helps to have a syllable-count pattern.
• Grammar and punctuation are good.
• Misusing grammar and punctuation is not your way of being free from constraints.
• Misusing grammar and punctuation means you don't know grammar or punctuation.
• Prose is not poetry.
• Metaphors are nice, but they don't bestow poetry status automatically.
• Capitalizing the first word in every line is cute, but that doesn't make it poetry.

Megan once said something marvelous. I can't quote her very well, but I'll paraphrase as best as I can. I was once lamenting to her about the horrid state of poetry these days. I asked her why poetry tends to be so bad. She described how poetry, for most people, is not so much an art as an emotional outlet, a kind of self-help. It all made sense.

Poetry, real poetry, is not just a wistful babbling of inarticulate feelings. Poetry is a literary search for deeper truths that cannot be expressed with conventional imagery. Truth cannot be approached whimsically. It must be approached contemplatively, patiently, and with effort. Poetry is an art.

It just struck me that most arts are infected with the same disease as poetry: uncontemplated piles of quaint babbling. Here I am thinking of the visual arts and of music (which is often a combination of crap instrumentation with crap lyrics).

I typed "million dollar painting" into Google and got this:

Such skill. Such contour. Such meaning. Such crap. (Plus, it's being sold for ten million dollars.)

Don't even get me started on Justin Bieber.

$10,000,000 worth of lucky timing, lucky placement, and absurd viewers. So often, I wish I had fewer morals so that I could justify exploiting people.

Sigh.

I was so proud!

I recently wrote the following poem for Megan. Initially, she tried to find it online because she thought it was some famous poem or something :D! Once she couldn't find it, she realized I wrote it :D!

It gave me warm feelings :)

A Reddened RoseI wanted to send you a flower,
But I didn't know where you would be,
So I decided to send you a reddened rose
Across the wandering sea.
Its roots are of a distant truth –
Unknown to the currents or winds.
Its stem is the warmth between us:
Both balmy and conflagrant kinds.
Its thorns are the infernal storms
That you and I have endured,
But, though the waves swelled high and dark,
We have not been immured.
Its petals are your eyes,
Each shining like a guiding star,
The creasing smiles that capture my soul,
Each is one of my greatest treasures by far.
I wanted to send you a flower,
But I didn't know where you would be.
Please accept these words from my heart,
My dreamed and dreaded Rosaly.

Also, while we're on the topic of good vs. bad art, here's a tiny study I did on worship music: https://www.facebook.com/notes/nathan-mark-rudolph/worship-music-sucks/593870707386214

(Note: I used to have a link to the specific song I imitated, but the page was taken down. Curious.)

As it turns out, stereotypical worship songs do not resemble classic poetry, popular songs, or even biblical psalms. I don't know what crap we Christians have been imitating, but we could at least start imitating the Bible.

There are so many things to do, and I have only just re-begun having enough heart to do them! It's partially saddening, but mostly it puts a bold feeling in my chest – as if there are things to discover and create. There are things to discover, and I am allowed – nay – given the adventurous responsibility of discovering them. Ever so recently and suddenly, I've had the impulse to write books. I have to finish Werbel obviously. I might want to write something about how to approach learning. I definitely want to write something about how to write better poetry. Slowly, thoughts and feelings about Tetraearth have bubbled up. I also randomly wanted to start a tacky little Facebook group page thingy: Grammar Responsibly. It'd just be my collection of pictures of misused grammar. I'd post the picture and write how and why it could be corrected.

You may want to think of me as a nerdy jerk or something, but the world is a lovely place, and it can be made lovelier with words (not to mention poetry). I'm not a grammar nazi. I'm just a grammar activist, so you can take your unread attitude back to Burger King and feed our future politicians.

Some people like pretty flowers. Some people like soothing music. Some people like dishes in the sink instead of on the counter. Some people like meaningful tattoos. Some people like fast phones. All of these things are good and lovely in their place. I like proper grammar.

The main thing I wanted to share, though, was that I've wanted to do things. I don't know how many of you have heard about my life in the recent past, but that's like a thing for me. I want to do things. Craziness.

I'm gonna go start on my How to Write Poetry book – at least an outline.