Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Never ask a Poet what they Mean

Never ask a poet what they mean

Well yesterday’s blog hit an all-time low….I guess readers didn’t like the prose poetry or perhaps it was the topic or the slightest whiff of sensual prose. It is lucky for me that I don’t do this for a living.

Sometimes however, I wake up in a mood….have an edge and feel as if my muse is sitting on my shoulder exercising her influence. When that happens I’m inclined to go with the flow to see what happens. What’s the difference between six and forty six readers after all, neither number is worth getting excited about.

I think readers get off the train the same way they get on. When a piece of writing or some idiot takes them as far as they intend to go, they step off.

Let me talk about prose poetry. That is what yesterday’s blog was. To write it you start out in free verse. Many think that Free Verse is prose chopped up in little pieces but I think of it the other way around. Good prose is free verse, run together into sentences and paragraphs.

The origins come from different places. Prose can come largely from the intellect but free verse comes from the spirit. So when you start writing free verse you are having a discussion with a different part of your brain. This discussion requires novelty, meter and art while prose requires none of these components. As a reader when you read a piece of exposition, that you think is particularly well written, break it into segments as you would lines of poetry. If it converts readily then you know it probably started out as free verse and the author decided to try something unusual to come up with a more animated chunk of writing.

Prose poetry is easily disguised as exposition, the main difference being that it flows into the reader’s bio-processor with a remarkable and fluid facility. You hardly have to concentrate to read it.

So if you didn’t like the mantra of yesterday’s blog, or you felt it was making fun of fat people, if the idea of minions inside our body sounded stupid and the reference to procreative activities hit a sour note…. Too bad, so sad. What it did do is flow like poop through a tin goose….whatever that means. Has anybody ever seen a tin goose that was some sort of container or funnel? I like the sound of that analogy, which I heard when I was young and never understood what it meant. As a kid I remember once telling a joke to my teacher my brother had told me. I didn’t understand it and later I realized it had homosexual implications. She didn’t understand it either but I bet her husband did. She was not happy with me for the next couple of weeks. So I suppose the moral of the question is that if you don’t understand what you’re doing don’t say it…. But then that would mean that poets should not write poetry, because I guarantee that they don’t understand most of what they write. That indeed you probably understand it better than they do and if you asked them to explain what they mean, you’d become convinced that they were morons or imposters.

That I think sometimes describes myself and that was who I was talking about in yesterday’s blog. One of my favorite sayings is… “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.” I know exactly what that means.