“Such torment and bitter angst is my lot!”
Folks, I am deeply saddened — perhaps a bit shocked.
I received several thousand complaints about my previous two “creativity” blogs, all objecting that they were rather light on actual technique.
I’ve gotten the message loud and clear. This time I will be very specific about the process of creating a poem.
Before we get started, I confess I’m having difficulty recalling why I started writing poetry.
Frankly, I hate poetry. I find it tedious and incomprehensible.
Aah! Now I remember.
It was an ad I saw a few years ago.
That sure didn’t pan out.
But I did manage to crank out a few poems and at least got the hang of it. So here we go.
Writing a poem . . .
Rhythm is very important in poetry. So when I write poems I always wear headphones with either Eminem or Lil John blasting away at 125 db. That tunes me in to the naturally occurring “beats” of the English language.
I wait for a word or phrase to pop into my head.
Tabula rasa.
Cool.
Now I think of pop singers and movie stars.
Crystal Gayle . . . The Artist Formerly Known As Prince . . . Tom Cruise . . . Brooke Shields.
Excellent! A veritable goldmine.
I chop them up and throw them together, trying to sound deep and intellectual.
A gale reels topsy turvy / Unknown be the blind enigma / Who shield the arrogant prince / Art shan’t brook the prayers / Cruise lightly the tabula rasa / Crystal now keens the water goddess / Hear the rumbling tom tom / Why dost thou feed the feral beast?
Admittedly this makes no sense. So we’re on the right track.
Now we find rhyming words for the first, third, fifth and seventh lines.
nervy / rinse / pasta / condom
Next we create lines ending in these words.
Conscience writhes a hollow nervy / Invisible angels fear the rinse / Yet twirl the Hades voidal pasta / Time warps he who pricks the condom
Notice that I made up a word. This is an excellent technique for putting your readers on the defensive, playing on the fear that their vocabulary is embarrassingly wanting.
Recognizing that rhyming, perhaps once the delight of long dead poets, is now among the heady and hyper-cerebral denizens of modern literary excellence laughably passé — more the tinker toys of vapid pop songsters — it’s time to dig out our good old Thesaurus, either analog or digital will do just fine, and make some tasteful substitutions.
Conscience writhe a hollow pluck / Invisible angels fear the cleanse / Yet twirl the Hades voidal spaghetti / Time warps he who pricks the sheath
Insert these in the initial set of lines.
Okay. Almost done. Now we need a title.
Tabula Rasa #???
Always choose a prime number. Let’s see. ’11’ is such a cliche. ’13’ was ruined by horror flicks. Bob Dylan screwed up ’12’ and ’35’. They’re not prime numbers anyway.
How about? . . .
Tabula Rasa #23
Perfect! Okay, now formatting is of paramount importance. Modern poetry really shows its inherent rebellious character here. Total non-conformity! Left alignment is boorishly 17th and 18th Century, right alignment hackneyed 20th Century, and centering is for symmetry fetishists with terminal OCD.
Same goes for punctuation. Not that poets know how to punctuate in the first place. But the point is why waste such a terrific opportunity for abstruseness? Randomly scattering punctuation throughout the poem is the perfect method for adding a tasteful dose of sheer madness and syntactic chaos!
Alright! Let’s put it all together. Behold our new masterpiece . . .
Notice how I slipped a near-rhyme in at the end. That should stir up some controversy!
Okay. That was easy, eh?
If you feel the need to verify my credentials, just click here and look at the several poems I’ve had published over the past few years.
Scribo ergo sum.
