Beginnings...

I'll put out a blowhard alert on this first post as I have to start somewhere.

The first poetry I read that really transfixed my imagination was classical. Shakespeare, Byron and the like brought forth sonnets and meticulously phrased threads that in few words sprouted towers of meaning. In my early work I would sweat the concise forms, attempting to master their rigid structures so my expressions would have a foundation based on the essential.

Much of the modern poetry and free verse I had read seemed to lack this basic understanding and as a result sounded artless with no inner music or beat to move the underlying structure. On the other hand, the expertly formed and super-intellectual modern verse I read felt like missives to an in-crowd, postured in the back rooms of collegiate snobbery. Both smacked of a type of blustery self-importance that I felt distanced true lovers of poetical grace.

I was never a Picasso fan, but I always had an admiration for the fact he had mastered differing forms of painting before he created his own flight of abstraction away from the norm. I always felt that was exactly how he had made something new-out of the understanding of all that had come before. I felt poetry was the same and any unique voice I had would have to be fired through the oven of classicism before it would resonate with it's own glaze. Thus, I spent some years working on my foundation.

This was an early effort that was inspired by what I refer to above, the seeming self-importance of the modernists presented as self-satire:


ARTLESS

Some muse extols me to a rhythm
both off-sync and tinny
in beat with no repeat:
a subtle crash of silence
brazens the mind
in a careless second of instinct
leading to my jazzy conclusion-
a vacant inspiration.


The above plays with the satire by the free form. That was rare in my earlier work as most poems fell into classical structure with a little uniqueness, such as:

UNREQUITED

O' true love hewn false,

so sincere in pattern molded;

its flaws kilned to burst asunder-

this man in twain

twixt peace and thunder.

I was a pretty serious guy for a long period of time before I learned to meld more of my personality into my work. Frankly, I find straight Poetics to be a dry drink and the discussions thereof like an air martini. Before this first post gets arid, I'll toss out this example of a more fully realized piece:

TALKING REDEMPTION BLUES

I was waning, yawning

into slippage

when your smile pushed me

over its image

and I perched hanging

on your words.

Conversing

and converging,

we poured out exquisitely

all our eccentricities

and the flights were alive

with the color of blood.

We were like

lustful Incas in the sun.

Unforgiving.

And talking our sly sins

white.

This reads like talking around a freebase round but I tried to put in an internal meter and beat that made the overall meaning sing a little more and ping out a little fun. From here on out I will probably post work with very little preface or mechanical breakdown as I truly believe 90% of the enjoyment by the reader is having their own experience with the words. If I or anyone wishes to get too analytical we can always ruin the mood in the comments section. Structural breakdown fascinates me but you will find I always yield to the boredom factor.