{"id":3372,"date":"2012-06-22T06:00:35","date_gmt":"2012-06-22T11:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=3372"},"modified":"2012-06-22T06:00:35","modified_gmt":"2012-06-22T11:00:35","slug":"3372","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=3372","title":{"rendered":"Other Nasty Habits"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ooooooooh, poetry. Yeah.<\/p>\n

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Sigh.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m no good at poetry. I appreciate some, disdain some and have absolutely no opinion about the majority of it. I understand the theories of poetry, the forms it takes, how it\u2019s supposed to work. I respect the big name poets but have a lot of love for the popular ones. In particular Shel Silverstein and his beautiful \u2018Where the Sidewalk Ends\u201d collection.<\/p>\n

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This pretty well sums up how I feel in general about poetry. Photo of Charles Bukowski copyright 1981 Mark Hanauer. Found here.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That gets me in trouble with serious lovers of poetry. I go on to mention that Charles Bukowski interests me, but that I often don\u2019t get his work like I think I should. That\u2019s my failure. I get Pablo Neruda more, especially his love poems, though I have to read him in translation.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t write poetry any more. I tried after reading Richard Bach, but I just wasn\u2019t good at it. I wrote songs rather than poetry and that\u2019s an important distinction for me. Songs are to be sung and poetry is to be recited. I get that. I get the imagery that has to be evoked in just a few words, the feelings that have to be described with lots of metaphor and space and tune and scale. This makes sense to me. The math of poetry makes sense to me, too, as does the math of music and lyrics individually. The math of a good song is as beautiful as the song itself and I can see it separately.<\/p>\n

But I prefer to have more room to express my moods and feelings and imagery.<\/p>\n

So I don\u2019t write poetry. Not any more.<\/p>\n

And I don\u2019t write songs, either.<\/p>\n

That said, I look for the rhythm in my stories, the beats, the crescendoes, the meaningful pauses.<\/p>\n

I wrote a series of thirteen short stories with the idea of each story being a song on an album and the album as a whole being a larger work. A series of short stories that told a larger one. Most of them had four movements, chapters, and I serialized it on the web in weekly installments as though I were leaking songs a little bit at a time.<\/p>\n

But that wasn\u2019t poetry. That wasn\u2019t what poets do. I didn\u2019t stand up in front a group and recite my verse, I didn\u2019t wear a striped shirt or a beret and sip cappuccino while snapping my fingers. I don\u2019t do \u2018slams\u2019. I need more than poetry can provide.<\/p>\n

Maybe that makes me a snob.<\/p>\n

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Okay.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m fine with that. But if I\u2019m going to experiment, I won\u2019t do it in verse where my inadequacies will only be seen for the worst. I\u2019ll do it with a short story rather than a poem. Or a song. I don\u2019t have a venue to share music and I don\u2019t have the time or even the technical knowledge and certainly not the skills to pull off the instrumentation of a song any more. I mess around with Garage Band once in a while, but that\u2019s just noodling. I\u2019ll sometimes think of a line or two that seem to work well together, but they don\u2019t inspire me to write a stanza or a verse. That\u2019s just doodling. I\u2019d rather wax poetic with full sentences, paragraphs and stories, the whole kit-n-kaboodle thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ooooooooh, poetry. Yeah.         Sigh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[175,856,998,1034],"class_list":["post-3372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-process","tag-charles-bukowski","tag-poetry","tag-shel-silverstein","tag-songwriting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3372\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}