POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Why are the stamps adorned with kings and presidents?
That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
Well, I have been letting the blog slide as I have focused ever more on my writing.
I really appreciated our meeting last week and found it to be very helpful. I am amazed at how you can turn something around entirely with a change of a single word - for instance:
"empowerment" vs. "power"
"arithmetic" vs. "math"
The power of an appropriate word in an appropriate place is truly amazing - even if it is only subtly different from a seeming synonym.
As we both acknowledged, approaching the concept of elegance is the hardest, but I've made some significant progress in that area. Here too I wrestle with translating from what works in a spoken format to what will work in a written format. I had to throw my old approach to this idea out the window and start fresh.
I imagine the concepts of mathematical and poetic elegance are things that cannot be experienced with fullness through explanation but rather must simply be experienced. I'll just have to explain as best I can and hope some experience comes along with it.
For the most part I have scrupulously avoided "explaining" any poems, but in one instance in this chapter I am allowing myself to take a poem apart and explain it. I realize explaining a poem is along the lines of explaining a joke - it ruins it - but if I ruin just one in order to make others more approachable, that is, perhaps, acceptable.
I'm still concerned that so much of the poetry that I use has death as its theme. It is the one negative comment I have had when speaking on this topic. No matter how many light poems I include, if there is more than one about death people think it is too many. Unfortunately the poem that will work best in my chapter on elegance is "Not Waving but Drowning" by Stevie Smith.
Oh well, at least I found Howard Nemerov's fun poem Power to the People (with which I began this entry). I'm revising chapter one on playfulness to include that - especially pleased to have another playful poem by a "serious" poet.
