So, this whole time, I've been raving about the power of poetry and the ability to say so much with so little. Well, everything I've said about keeping it simple, stupid, you should throw out the window right now.
Well, go on. Throw it out. You can go pick it up later, but for now, we're going to talk about how less is more, but more is also more. Sometimes, more is so much more than just plain old some. Are you still with me? "Less is more" always worked for Coco Chanel, but honey, I'm a poet in ripped jeans and horizontal stripes, okay? I'm not here to make a fashion statement. I'm here to make a statement in as many words as I damn well please.
I'm a lover of words. Short ones, long ones, silly ones, technical ones, cuss ones, flowery ones... oh, how I love how flowery figurative speech can be. It is both my greatest strength and most damning downfall as a writer. I can be professional when I want to be, but for the most part, the more flower, the more power I can punch into what I'm trying to say.
For example, here is a perfectly good poem:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Sugar is sweet,
and so are you.
It is simple, and memorable in its simplicity, I suppose. It's the original love poem we are first taught back in Kindergarten. Simple - it gets the point across. "I like you." It's the equivalent of those store-bought Valentines we all gave out to our classmates without prejudice in elementary school. Unless you were one of those cruel kids who only gave Valentines out to your friends, in which case, you Sir, are a jerk.
It doesn't convey emotion, though. That's the sad part about this happy little ditty - it doesn't make me feel special enough to give a crap about this poem.
Let's make it pretty. Add some glitter and some jazz and some sprinkles, add imagery and coloring. There's red, there's blue, there's the black and white of the thinking happening here. But there's no sparkle, no pizzazz. I almost wrote "pizzas," but that wouldn't make any sense. So let's use it!
Roses are red, in a way that pizza is red,
red sauce, smothering the dough.
Mottled with veggies, none of them blue.
Blue like the violets,
Or the way I feel without you.
We can keep going, but this doesn't make much sense. However, poetry isn't necessarily supposed to make sense. Sometimes it's just for fun, and those of you who have read Lewis Carroll or Dr. Seuss can understand that. So much nonsense and what for? Pure entertainment. Poetry is not a job; that's why we don't have professional poets. If poetry were a profession, it would be ruined.
But look at my revised version of your go-to Valentine verse. It's nothing like anything you've read in a Hallmark card. You've never heard anything like it and seeing as we went from roses to pizza to being desolate without our lover, you're probably not apt to read anything similar anytime soon. Think about this, though: when reading the original, did your face move at all? Did you raise an eyebrow, turn up the corners of your lip in a smile, blow extra air out your nose in that distracted half-assed appreciation of mirth we all display unknowingly while scrolling through I Can Haz Cheezburger photos? You know the one I'm talking about - where your brain says, "This is funny, and I'm laughing!" but your nose just says, "pff," and moves on to the next meme. (Someone pointed that out to me once, and it's one of those things that CANNOT BE UNSEEN.) Chances are, you did not. You did not have a reaction to the former poem because it doesn't say anything you haven't heard before, and even if it does spew recycled sentiment at you, it doesn't say it in a way that makes us think about it differently. What does that piece offer to make it stand out from any other greeting card copy?
Now look back at the latter poem. It has been extended into more ideas. It has elaborated on just what kind of red those roses are. It has gone into detail what the redness looked like, and what the speaker feels about the color blue, and about the subject. We've added a simile! A smile with an extra i!
Quick sidebar: I love similes and metaphors. This is what I just decided about similes, and I'd like to share it with you.
Simile = a smile with an extra "i." The extra "i" (eye) represents the new perspective the simile introduces.
"The girls giggled loudly." That's nice.
"The girls giggled loudly, like a troop of Brownies."
I used a s i m i l e and it made me s m i l e, because of the new i (eye) I read it with. Now, the girls didn't just giggle loudly, they giggled in a way I can imagine because I can see, in my mind, a troop of Brownies giggling and I can imagine how loud that could be.
If you're writing poetry just for the sake of getting it on paper, then you're not writing it with a purpose. You're writing a pretty journal, and that's okay. It's for you. If you're writing for someone else, if you're writing to really convey a message, or if you have a specific target audience, such as the apple of your eye, then you might want to put more of yourself into your writing than the bare bones basic.
I'm not a John Mayer fan, but his song about saying what you need to say, well, it's spot-on. If your word is as powerful inside as you think it is, then you have the ability to pull it out and make a statement on paper. Don't keep it inside. If it needs to come out, do it justice and say it in the best way possible. If you've got a lot of love to give, let it all out and watch as it all comes back tenfold. That's how love works - and that's exactly how I feel about good poetry. Put your best words into the Universe and bask in the beautiful words that come back around.
I'm not going to tell you to have a nice evening. Go have a wonderful evening filled with laughter, love, and learned lessons.
See? You might hear your checkout girl tell you to have a nice day, and forget she said so before you walk out the door, but if she were to tell you to have a wonderful day of soaking in the beauty of the world, you're going to remember that she said that to you, aren't you?
Seriously, go have a wonderful evening. Thanks for reading.
xoxo :)
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