From House Wife To Film Maker

Feb 04 2010

Free form poetry “forms” my day . . .

3 responses so far

3 Responses to “Free form poetry “forms” my day . . .”

1. 
   # Invisible Mikeyon 06 Feb 2010 at 1:16 pm

   I’m about as good at estimating the value of poetry as I am at picking tile, however I think this effectively conveyed the feeling of being overwhelmed by circumstances, yet being propelled forward by the process. That’s a pretty neat trick to convey, especially since it’s free verse about someone not feeling too free while getting through what’s gotta get done.

2. 
   # TheresaJaneon 07 Feb 2010 at 10:23 am

   I love your comparison to your estimating poetry to picking tile. A double LOL. And BTW thanks foe mentioning that what I was utilizing was free verse. The night I wrote that I couldn’t for the life of me remember what the duce it was called and I didn’t want to take the time to do a search. Thanks to you I now know.

   Thank you for letting me know that you thought of the “poem”. I did have fun constructing it. I didn’t even attempt to take the time to apply counting off the rhythm and so forth the one thing I did was to attempt to make each stanza six lines and I didn’t have to strain at that too much, it sort of fell into that pace. And it’s something that for some odd reason comes easy for me anyway. I also threw in a dab of E.E. Cummings style by adding one line here and there. I like what Cummings did with poetry, I tend to be like him in a lot of ways. I didn’t even know about him till I took a college writing course though. Poetry is one of those things that I always found and find very intriguing. When I took my college writing course, a couple years ago, it was very heavily poetry and I didn’t know that going it. This was the type of teacher who decided which direction he took the class after having all of us say what we wanted to accomplish with our writing skills. I want to say that I expressed an inward groan to hear “where we were going”, however by the end I was glad we had. Poetry teaches you a lot. Word conservation, picking the perfect word to express and covey a ton of things… I was certainly stretched in that class to say the least. Esp. when he did this thing where he picked one piece from a bunch of our work and told us we had to keep at it till it was perfected. Then we could go onto another. He laid down the one poem, not story, poem, that I struggled with creating in the first place. It became like a movie. Class after class that same poem marked up with his comments came down again and again. It wasn’t even very long… One class I wanted to tear it into a million pieces. But then, I finally got it. He even read it to the class and said that this was a perfect, beautiful poem. By then it didn’t seem that way to me, kinda like when you write the same word over and over suddenly you’re questioning whether you are spelling it right anymore. But he loved it, I got an A and it was behind me and I was on to the next. Which by then we were starting a new “thing”. I had used all my time working on that poem. However I did learn a lot with that poem. Things that come up for me quickly in my writing today in my blog or where ever. And I will say that I wish I had the time to take another class, on that focuses only on poetry because of how it pushes a writing to a new level.

   Your writing is quite good have you ever taken a course? Or are you self developed? Aside from that course I am, so far, self-developed. Which I do think to a large degree is really the way it is with writing. It is something you have to just do a ton of for it to become a skill you possess.

   Today I’m taking the day off. A full fledged, no work day. I need it. I may have a day or two here or there where I may back off on what I do, but not a day where I blow the whistle and stop. Today’s that day. I need it. Totally. Wanted to do my blog yesterday but the local Cable company was having funky troubles with all my services so internet connections was a no go, barely could watch TV which was all I wanted to do after getting home from the expo yesterday at 8:30. I just wanted me, hot cocoa, and an On Demand movie and bed. Had to settle for entering each channel through my number pad searching through channels I had no idea what they were because they weren’t listing, the guide was a no go, plus I don’t watch TV at all, my kids do but I don’t I’m a movie gal. So that was interesting. I did amazingly find one to watch, the old Bonnie and Clyde movie hadn’t seen it in years without end, and it was OK but it was something anyways.
   Theresa Jane

3. 
   # Invisible Mikeyon 07 Feb 2010 at 12:49 pm

   I did take some courses, yes, but as you point out it’s mostly learned by doing it.
   I wrote about half of my junior college’s weekly paper. After two years of that I was a more effective writer. I can’t overstate the influence reading has had for me. The more you read, the more you become aware of who’s good, and how they are achieving their intent. I’m also aware of my wife’s work as a journalist. I watch newscasts she writes fairly often. Since good news writing is about more story in fewer words, I’ve tried to pick up some of that. I also admire Hemingway, whose best work displays the use of “less is more”. I read Hemingway for economy and impact, Twain and O. Henry for humor, Dickens and Bradbury for heart, Shakespeare for the sheer beauty of the spoken word, Albee and Beckett for pain, Dostoyevsky for guilt, Hesse for the search for spiritual truths, and on and on. I do like cummings, too.

   I use the TV almost entirely to watch movies. Aside from that it’s only House, and rehab shows. My wife has a thing about HGTV, which is why I knew about their mania for granite.

   Glad to read you took time off. If every second is planned, there’s not enough room for the miraculous, which seems to happen to me only when I have left some space for it.

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