The Commonplace

One little poetry rule that I didn't realise I had until today is not to use the raven, or the crow. Poe could use them, but he was a genius and they weren't cliche then. Since I'm not, and they are, I can't, if you follow. Their gothicisation is abysmal anyway: a crow's wings are lustrous and iridescent in the light, shining with a thousand colours; and they walk, or hop, like tipsy comedians. Their calls are maybe a little harsher, and come in with winter, but there's something greatly familiar and settling about them too.

One can use the other corvines, of course, but they all have complex attributes. Putting them into simplistic settings just isn't smart; almost isn't cricket. Putting them into commonplace settings, on the other hand, is an angle to try. The amazing lies in the commonplace, as Shakespeare and Chesterton like to show.

Another way to deponcify poetry is to make sure there's no redundant crap in there. I showed William Loughborough a line from a poem that I wrote which started out, structurally, something like "the breeze it swirled". He immediately tapped at the "it" and asked what it was doing there. Obviously it was just propping up the metre, but it was also adding pretentiousness. It was also a lost opportunity at extra descriptiveness, so eventually I changed it to "the breeze swirled up", and even though it was only a miniscule change, in context it made all the difference.

The best poetry is written by the subconscious, which is I suppose why there is so much bad poetry around since the subconscious is difficult to engage in such matters: we call it inspiration and intuition and a gift and so on. But what about when you want to write poetry as an essay about some small but concrete question or thread that you're tracing? I've found that it's still best to engage the subconscious, even if you do stray off of the rails a bit. There really is just nothing literarily worse than strained or hollow poetry. It should just be words about stuff, bunged together in such a way that you're being more artistic than scientific; more beautiful than aesthetic.

One nice symmetry or analogy with prose is that really good poetry, like prose, is often very simple with a few scattered gems in it. But whereas with prose this usually takes the form of a loquacious but concise word thrown in unexpectedly, with poetry you get to take even greater liberties and invent new words, or new idioms, or do even more syntactically disregarding stuff. I suppose that's one of the main funs of writing it.