Mending fences...sometimes

I write this blog post a day late, but I'm beginning to realize that whether I post something on Wednesday or not really isn't the point. The point is if I post something at all or not. On the eve of finishing a paper for my Humanities class, I succumbed to the idea for a new poem and started working on that. The poem was my second attempt at an abstract style.

You see, a couple of months ago I wrote a poem about my hometown, Sheboygan, WI. Somehow, in the midst of trying to figure out how to sort out my frustrations with it and my passion for it, the poem ended up forming itself into a rigid, very abstract form that surprised me but ultimately turned out to exemplify my feelings for Sheboygan better than had I gone my traditional poem-writing route and wrote it free-verse. That poem, entitled Hometown, and the identically styled poem I just finished writing today entitled Trees Don Their Petticoats, has left me wavering on my once strong stance against formal poetry.

You see, I've always explained to others - well, okay, mostly to myself! - that my style of poetry writing is like a wild mustang roaming the vast, insipid plains of Nevada. If you were to bridle and saddle that mustang fresh off of the plains, you'd have a hell of a time trying to ride it wouldn't you? Such is the way I feel when I'm forced - or sometimes even when I'm not - to write within a poem within a form. Now it doesn't matter if that form is something like so many words or syllables per line, or a certain topic, or a certain length, or anything in between, any kind of form feels like that mustang running full-tilt across the plains when he slams into a rigid fence, stumbling back in shock, then realizes he's wearing a harness, and a saddle, and someone is trying to mount him.

It wouldn't feel natural would it? That's the same way I feel with poetry forms. Give me a specific topic to write on, I'll be fine with that, but give me specific guidelines I have to work in? And suddenly that lush, thickly-bedded field I'm standing in, listening to the fields sway with a thousand whispers, their thin bodies darkened by autumn's golden touch, a haphazard array of wildflowers bending with the breeze, their colors melding with one another, the pure essence of country life...is all hemmed in by hard, plastic fencing. Even though they're miles off, simply a thin white line in the distance broken up by undulating hills, I can feel them pressing in, breaking off the feel of the land rolling on forever, no longer joining hands with the horizon and skipping gaily on, perhaps plucking a few of the flowers from the field to twine in their hair.

Now I may strike you as overly dramatic on that part, but it's how I've mentally pictured such a scenario to be. When I write, I desire it to be as unfettered as possible. No fences, not even a dilapidated, rusty barbed wire fence trampled to the ground, an old form of poetry forgotten and abandoned. Granted, in the words of a professor at my former college, UW-Sheboygan, poetry forms can draw poems from us that perhaps couldn't have been coaxed out otherwise, and turn into something vivid and beautiful that we second guess if it was in fact, us, that wrote it. But even such a notion isn't enough to make me any less repulsed by the idea of forms.

But, you make wonder, didn't you just before say that you've given slightly on that front? And yes, you would be right. I did say that. But here's the difference. That was my own form I came up with. Somehow putting my own fences around the hypothetical field of the writer within me - albeit temporary fences - is acceptable. Now maybe you don't understand how that can be, and find it contradictory, but it's the truth for me nonetheless. Perhaps to explain it better I'll go back to the idea of the mustang again. Isn't there a difference between him being forced into capture, and him choosing it? When he chooses to be captured, he is willing to accept all the restrictions and the new definition of freedom that will come with it. Versus if he were forced into captivity, he wouldn't be nearly as willing to accept the new contexts handed to him.

Also, when I mentioned the slowly-emerging form with which I wrote my poem about Sheboygan and how it effortlessly captured and explained everything I was struggling under the weight of to effectively convey and mention, it brings me back to what my UW-Sheboygan professor had said about poetry forms drawing from that rare trickle of talent buried deep within us. The poetry form I used for my poem about Sheboygan as well as for the recent poem I finished consisted of simple stanza's of three, two-word lines and three, one-word lines. With this condensed form of poetry I found I had to condense my thoughts to abstract ideas. And in all truth, it was the first abstract poem I had attempted.

That's another thing. I truly hate reading those type of poems that make you feel like your eyes are simply sliding around on the surface of all those randomly tied and jumbled words like an inexperienced child left to flounder on the ice, its chipped surface slicing into him again and again, each time giving way less and less. Now granted, I could sit there and try to figure out such a poem's meaning, but seriously? I would like to read a poem and feel like I have at least even a small chance of figuring out what it means. I dislike being left with the notion that I'm too limited imagination - and patience - wise to pluck at the hardened guitar strings of a poem, bending over it with ear pressed tight, waiting for the slightest sound to escape, to give me the faintest notion at all of what lays trapped within its wooden body. Okay, maybe that was cynical, but I'm sure all of you know by now I have a certain cynical side, she's got to come out and play sometime doesn't she?

Anyway, back to the point. Albeit by writing two abstract poems in the ultra-condensed form I mentioned above, perhaps I'm contradicting my distaste for abstract poems of both the honored poets of yesteryear and also modern poets. Because after all, when poets wrote their abstract poems, I'm sure they knew perfectly well what they were talking about, and perhaps bounced in their chair will glee at what professional critics and the general public alike would take from it. Just as when I wrote Hometown and Trees Don Their Petticoats I knew perfectly well what I meant in every line and stanza as well. Whether people will get the same notion and ideas when they read them all depends on their perspective and a slew of other things. So perhaps I have inadvertently presented myself as a hypocrite throughout this entire blog post, and perhaps my once rigid stances against both poetry forms and abstract poetry no longer stand like a newly built threshold beckoning the way into a recently built home where every corner is plumb and the basement has set to sink into the earth, but instead that threshold may be more like the sagging wooden beam of an aged, dilapidated farmhouse. One that has swayed with the pressure of time upon it, the constant downward thrust of a boot, sandal, or even a bare foot. A threshold that feels itself being pulled with the house as it forms to the earth, embracing it perhaps, each board, window pane, plaster wall and wooden door becomes not a solid structure but a liquid form melding into each other, the centuries becoming feared less and less.

Whatever I have made myself out to be in this blog post, I know one thing for certain. If and only if I choose to write a poetry in a form, it must be one I have sketched myself. For if I am standing in the swaying, haphazard beauty of that field and fences are being built around me, I may write, and find something breathlessly beautiful and perplexing on the other side, but it won't be as satisfying as if I had built those fences myself, leaving the nails halfway out, the boards paint less and sagging. Because sometimes I mend those fences, other times, I don't.