Rational Insanity
Poetry
Admittedly, there are other better writers out there who are easily more knowledgeable in poetry than I am. I have no formal training when it comes to the craft that I am passionately in love with. However, being a writer myself, I know that it is not the poet that makes the poem but the poem that makes the poet. This is like saying that when a poet composes a poem, the poem takes on a life all its own. When a poem has been set on paper it begins its journey toward liberation. One of my mentors, Dr. Leo Deriada, once said that 'a poem needs to be liberated from the paper, hence; I must say that the act of writing a poem is simply the beginning of poetry. Where does poetry end then, if this is the case? I dare say that unlike the poet who soon succumbs to the biological reality of death, the poem is immortal. It is not the poet that gives the poem its immortality; it is the poem that survives its writer.
That said; let me give you a glimpse into the journey that most of us call madness that literaturists refer to as poetry.
A poem is not just a bunch of words expertly arranged on a piece of paper to make sense -- this is just the tangible element of poetry which we would refer to as the form. Another aspect of poetry is its substance. Aside from just the words that we read from the printed page, a poem has something more up its sleeve. For instance, if we read a poem written traditionally, we will notice that there are rhymes in the poem and the syllables in each line total to exactly the same number for each line. This element of poetry is the form, but only part of it. There are still other aspects of form to consider such as the figures of speech used, the device, the grammar, and many other things we might even consider absurdly technical. After reading a poem, we are usually left with a feeling. This feeling that the poem leaves us with is what literaturists would refer to as the substance. There is no other way to explain what poetic substance is but to use a very simple analogy. A human being without a soul is an empty shell, therefore, a poem without substance is simply a bunch of words without any significance whether to the reader or to its author.
These technical things about poetry have been hurled at me for many times in the past already (every time I attend a seminar or workshop), but I remember back in Cebu where I attended the UP VisMin Creative Writing workshop, I presented Ma'am Merly Alunan with a technical dissection of the craft. I showed her a table I came up with to make writing poetry much easier (yes, I meant easier, because poetry is the most difficult genre to work with), and when she saw the table she praised me by saying that I have structuralized how to write a poem, but took back the praise when she added that writing poetry should not be numbered, rather it should be spontaneous and fun. Now, here is the clincher -- this is why poetry is difficult -- imagine building a house. You already know how to build a house and you have all the tools and materials needed to build the house. Suddenly, the person who asked you to build the house comes up and tells you, 'Oh great, I can see you are truly ready to build my house, you have your materials and your tools. Now, I want you to build the house without using any of the tools and the materials that you have, just know that you have them, but build the house without them. Weird -- right? Anyway, poetry is really like this, once you are well-equipped with the technical skills you need to write a poem, then you need to forget about all those technical skills and write the poem from your heart, then worry about the technicalities later. The result -- a poem that is both good in form and good in substance.
Although I am a writer and poet myself, I cannot tell you exactly HOW TO WRITE A POEM. Any senior writer would tell you that, but ending this column on that note would render everything I said here useless. So, just so you would find this article useful in your pursuit of writing a good poem, let me tell you one thing -- the desire to write poetry is not enough to be able to write a poem. We all want to write good poetry, but only very few are able to do so. Of the hundreds of pieces that I have already written, only a very small handful could actually be considered poetry. Why is this so? Why is poetry so difficult? Why can't everybody just get a piece of paper and a pen and write a poem? Well, there is only one answer to this friends -- poetry breathes, it is alive eternally; a poet creates eternity on a piece of paper. Now, you wouldn't want that to be as easy as one, two, three, would you? Oh, and by the way, my friend Marcel, also a struggling poet recalls what we have been told by our mentors, 'There is no such thing as a bad poem, because a bad poem is not a poem at all, it's either you have written a poem or you haven't; it's either you have a poem or you don't.'
Be rational; be insane... every once in a while! TTFN! I love you all! Byers!