Word Pictures

We've all heard it. “Draw them a picture when you write.” Most of us start thinking, “Why not just take a freaking camera?” The problem with the camera is that it won't capture the feel of the place, or rarely does. It's possible, but it doesn't usually happen. The reason is that for most pictures, there is no context. Why is the photographer there? What does the image say to the person taking the picture? What does he/she feel about it? You can't get that in a photo, usually. There are exceptions, and I've seen a few. Ansell Adams was one. He could capture the feel of a place or a situation. Most can't. Because of that, a written description, if done well, can make you feel more a part of what's going on. The best example of that I can think of right now is the sign one of the Occupiers was holding. It was a young girl. The sign said, “My grandma died. She was denied a procedure that would have cost $7,000 by Blue Cross. The CEO of Blue Cross made 2.3 million dollars last year.” I don't think that's an exact quote, but you get the idea. It was in a picture of a girl holding the sign, but it was the words that carried the essentials.

Again, we don't really have a context of this. The girl's grandma could have been 99 years old and had multiple other problems that wouldn't be fixed by the one procedure, but the feel is there. The idea that she was denied a procedure while the CEO of the company made a huge salary was the point, not so much the result. So we're supposed to try to draw a picture with words. I'm not particularly good at that. I care more about the situation than the scenery. I've never done description particularly well, mostly because I started seriously trying to write screenplays. Since most directors ignore description in screenplays anyway, there's not a lot of point to putting it in. For my short stories, I put in enough so you get a feel for the place, and leave the rest to your imagination. That seems to work for me. For poetry, I don't use much description at all. I'm after a snapshot of an emotion, or a general feeling, and most of them don't have much to do with the setting. Others have, though, and done it well. Robert Frost made a name doing just that. Can you imagine “Stopping by a woods on a snowy evening” without scenery? It wouldn't have worked at all. The problem I have is that there are very few emotions that can't be described without resorting to scenery.

I once heard of a technique for practicing this. It was from a radio announcer. He said that when he started out, he would stand on a street corner and describe each car as it went by. The limitation was that he wasn't allowed to use the same word more than once. Try that. Stand by the street and describe each car that goes by without re-using words. I'm not sure I could do it for more than a minute or two. How many different ways can you describe a small sedan? The color may change, but then again, it might not. It would be a good exercise, though. I do need to practice this. One of the most important aspects of writing is that to be effective, you have to continue to grow. I have been avoiding that in the past few years. I need to get back to it. Seriously.

Been a few days.

It's been a few days since I've been here.  I've been trying to write more, and I'm not liking what's coming out very much.  That's happened before, and usually happens when I'm particularly disorganized, as I have been of late.  I try to impose structure on the stuff I'm writing, and it rarely, if ever, works.  I end up with a mess, so I'm not going to post them.  I will throw up another great line or two, again from Mark Strand.  In one of his poems he wrote,

"Life should be more
Than the body's weight working itself from room to room"

How do you argue with that?  How many of us find ourselves dragging our tired backsides from one room to another?  It's one of those lines that makes you stop and think.  I know, that can be dangerous, but it has to happen eventually.  Another great line:

"Is it really the wind, or is it the sound of somebody running
One step ahead of the dark?"

This one appeals to me because I resonate with the concept of dark.  A lot of that is because I've been dysthymic for years, and deal with darkness on an almost daily basis.  I don't do the deep periods of depression any more, thank Ghod, but they seem always on the edge of my consciousness.  I just don't go there.  When one of those moods is coming around, I can sense it and just stop.  I know only too well what "one step ahead of the dark" is about.  I hope Mark never experienced that, but this sounds too familiar.  It's like he know the problem very well.  He did manage to produce a number of books of poetry, though.  We should all buy them to encourage him to write more.

Great lines.

Okay, I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for a great line.  That's mostly what I look for in poetry, although I haven't managed a really good line for a while now.  One of my favorite poets is Mark Strand.  He's a bit of a master of the great line.  Do you know what I'm talking about?  That one line that captures a thought or an image in such a way that it resonates.  It hits your soul and bounces off.  You read it and immediately "get" it.  Let me try a couple of examples, from Mark Strand:

"The dust of a passion." 

Is that a great line or what?  We've all been there.  We knew times when we were so passionate about something, then it passed, and we look back with indifference on the thing that had us so enthralled for a while.

That's kind of a snapshot line.  The whole concept wrapped up in five words.  That takes a level of mastery that not many achieve.  Here's another one, although it takes more words: (Also from Mark Strand)

"The bitter remains of someone who might have been,
  had we not taken his place."

This line leaps past regret, I think.  We all know we're capable of a lot more than we are, but for some reason, there is something either in our psyche's or situation that prevents us from achieving all we can.  I read this line and picture an old man, sitting on a bench somewhere, wondering what the hell happened.  He had so much promise, and didn't realize much of it, if any.  He did everything he was supposed to do; he finished school, got the soul-sucking-job-from-hell, (but it paid well, and had decent benefits) got married, had a kid or two, got the house in mortgage heights, two cars, joined the right clubs, and never accomplished a single thing that he wanted to accomplish when he was in school.  Near the end of his life he looks back, and the line hits him right between the eyes.  It makes you wonder what the world would be like if we were able to accomplish those dreams we all had when we were young, doesn't it?  Would the world be a better place?  I don't know.  Young people tend to be pretty idealistic.  Not particularly realistic, but their motives are usually better.  At least they include things other than just making more money than someone else.  We get what we get, though.  I just hope I don't end up bitter.

The problem with words.

I've made a small discovery tonight. I think the problem I've been having is simply a problem of words. I haven't written in so long that I've lost some of my facility with them. That's been a bit of a rude awakening. For most of my life, or at least all of it I can remember, I have been able to express myself with words. It has always been my “thing.” Some people can dance, some can sing, some fell from the womb with the ability to draw or paint anything in such a way that you can't tell it apart from the real thing. My ability has always been with words. I could always write, beginning in the first grade when I made up a story and wrote it down. I handed it to my first grade teacher, Mrs. Godfry, and she gave me a weird look. I had done it in cursive, since they were on the green cards lining the top of the blackboard in the room. I simply looked at the green cards and copied what I saw. Anyway, nothing came of that. I don't know if she showed it to my mother or not. Anyway, I always wrote. And I always read. My mother insisted on that. For all of us four kids, we had to read. If it was raining outside, we read. She didn't care what we read, just that we read. She never discouraged us from reading anything, and for the longest time I would read anything I could get my hands on. I remember reading the backs of cereal boxes while sitting at the table.

I went through a bad poetry phase. I would write tons of little poems, all rhymed, nearly all in quatrains. I have no idea where they are now, but hopefully they will never be found. It was easy too. At the time, it was almost like I was thinking in rhyme.

Well, no longer. Now it's an effort. That is leaving me a bit disgruntled. It's not so much that the world needs any more badly written quatrains that rhyme, it's that I can't just roll them off like I used to. I think it's like a muscle. Either use it or lose it. In my case, I think I've let it atrophy. It's possible that I can get it back. I will see. I don't plan on writing a boatload of quatrains just to prove to myself that I can, but I do want to work in more rhyme. Since it appears that only one or two people are reading this, I hope you will indulge me. Thanks again.

Exploration

I was looking through some of my older stuff and found this one about exploration.  It's not only about our physical search for something different, it's about a search for meter within the poem.  In this one, all the lines contain 10 "beats," making it pentameter.  Line 2 has nine beats, and line 13 has 11, which was purely by accident.  I thought for a bit about cleaning it up, so that each line has 10, but I think it would take something away from the poem to do that.  This was an attempt at a sonnet, with 3 rhyming quatrains followed by a couplet.  I think that's called a Petrarchian sonnet, but it's been a while, and I'm too lazy to look it up to be sure.  Anyway, here it is.

Explore

Somber commentary on things that are

examines that which lays on the ground

beneath their feet not those seen from afar

a simple close look at things that are found

Every road must have a destination

or it would never have been built at all

No point in careful investigation

the great is just a lot more of the small

Stand at the corner and look at the field

look far away from where everything stands

Exploration provides the greatest yield

take a cautious stroll in uncharted lands

If you only see what you already know

you'll only confirm that which isn't so

Copyright 2010 Carl Thames

Weird stuff

I just came back and looked at the post from yesterday, and it's all over the page.  It didn't look like that when I put it up, and I don't know how to edit it.  Sorry about that.  I'll be more careful in the future.  I'm still working on the Poetry books, and made a minor score at a flea market last week.  I found an old literature book.  I love the "Intro to Literature" books.  They all have a ton of poetry, short stories, etc. and they talk about elements of them.  Due to the nature of textbooks, each author feels the need to come up with a different way of looking at such things, and some of them are interesting.  I don't know if I'm learning anything, but it can't hurt to read them.  I did get some weird looks from my brother, along with a comment like, "You read that crap for fun???" but I'm used to that.  No poem today either, or at least not right now.  I may be back later.

The way we are.

I just finished reading a book of poetry by Partricia Traxler.  I'd never heard of 

her, but that's not unusual.  I haven't heard of a lot of people.  I got the book 

at the library.  She writes about the usual things that poets write about; love, 

loss, abusive husbands, guilt.  In several of the poems she talks of communing 

with nature.  About two thirds of the way through the book, it struck me how 

differently men and women are in the world.  We experience the world differently, 

and because of that, we may never completely agree on how we should be in the 

world. We have different roles and although some manage to pull off the appearance

of performing the other's role, there is always something missing.  I don't know 

what that is.  It's not the heart, because they are sincere in what they're doing, 

but something just isn't there.  I think I'm going to examine that a bit in the 

coming time.  I'm not putting up a poem today, because I can't find one that I've 

already done that talks about this, but there will be some coming.

I just read the above again and heard a resounding "DUH!" from the crowd that lives 

in my brain. I've known about the difference for a while, naturally, but yesterday

it went deeper.  I'm not talking surface crap here, I'm talking about soul-deep 

stuff.  It's going to be interesting to see where this takes me.