New Poetry Method "One Word at a Time"

So I was reading "The Best Poems of the English Language" edited and selected by Harold Bloom, and I came on a new strategy to writing poetry. Here it is:

"one word at a time"

You'd think it was kind of simple. I'll use this blog post to try and explain. See, prose is written in thoughts, or sentences at a time. You think your thought, and then you write it down. At least, that's how I tend to write prose. Prose is a record of what has been thought. It can be edited, of course, to become essentially a script for what the writer wants the reader to think. Either way, it's a record of thought.

Poetry, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily contain the tracks of thought. Poetry has a similar function to prose, but not every thought is written down. What I mean by "one word at a time", is that after each individual word is written, the poet pauses, considers the word he or she just wrote, sees whether it fits into the poem, and whether an alternative would do the job better. Only when satisfied with that particular word, often having crossed out several alternatives, or at least rejected alternatives in her head, does she continue on to the next word.

Under this method, every word counts. Every word must be full of meaning, except maybe connecting words (like "of" and "to" and "the"), but even then, the connecting words must be analyzed, and it must be determined if they can be cut out. The only essential elements of a thought are one noun and one verb.

Now, different critics will come up with their own ideas for what makes great poetry, but Harold Bloom seems to believe that great poetry should be rich in ideas. It should be dense with thought. Every word should be suffused with meaning.

In addition, Bloom asks that poets always bring something new to a word when it is used. The English language has books full of overused words. After all, there isn't much difference between a cliche and an expression or idiom. Words are gradually worn out by so much use. And you don't have to have a huge literary background to know that a word is overused. It is simply enough that you know the expression you're using, to know that it is an existing part of the language. Any word used in exactly the way that you were given it, is probably a worn-out piece of language.

Remember, this is just one way to look at poetry, and other approaches will embrace the standard meanings of words. But in order to make every word count, you have to give it a slightly different meaning.

Unfortunately, what sometimes happens to words used novelly, is that they get broken. I really don't know the limit of how far you can stretch the meaning of a word before it snaps and becomes syntactically useless, that is, incapable of conveying any information beyond random syllables to increase the foot-count of a line of poetry.

So as you're considering each word, ask if you're using it exactly the way it has been handed down to you, or if you've managed to put a slight new twist on its meaning. And if you find that the word means exactly what convention dictates that it should mean, perhaps there is another word slightly less obvious that could take its place.

I have a theory regarding rhyme and rhythm, too. See, poets occasionally write with rhyme and rhythm in mind, and this can sometimes make them make strange choices in the words they use. The words often wouldn't be a prose-writer's first choice to convey the intended meaning, but instead are chosen more for their sound. The result is indeed a word used in a slightly new way, and the genesis was the rhymed poem. This might actually explain, partly, the popularity of rhymed poetry through the ages, as poets have found rhyme to be a useful way to find new meanings for old words.

Over My Head in Math

Among other books, I got in the mail yesterday, "The Fractal Geometry of Nature", by Benoit B. Mandelbrot. So far I've only been able to flip through it, but it has become quite clear that the mathematical language is over my head, and it might as well be written in German (ie. I have minimal experience with it, and it bears a passing resemblance to English, but not enough to make things intelligible to me.)

However, the book does contain lots of pretty pictures, and I am able to comprehend enough to be amazed that all of the pictures in the book are generated not by an artist [arguable], but by a computer program, or more precisely stated, by a mathematical algorithm that looks nothing like the final result.

The other amazing thing about fractal math is that people have been using it for the past thirty years in computer applications, and we simply wouldn't have as many of the modern technologies that we take for granted if it weren't for fractals. It may be over my head, but enough people in the world do understand it that it can be put to all kinds of practical uses.

One Day Visitors

One day visitors will take sideways steps
shuffle single-file through my flat
Like Walden Pond and Zarathustra's cave
and Emily Dickinson's attic.
They'll whisper: such a great mind
was in this space, confined?