Starvation Season

Writing a horror story in iambic pentameter is like eating tomato soup with a toothpick: you can vaguely sort of taste a hint of soup, but days and days and days will pass before you quench the hunger.

The Pot Holes of Narrative Verse

Anyone who writes a narrative in verse form must avoid two dangers:

1) Prosaic verse.

If the verse reads more like prose than poetry, then why write verse at all?

2) Bathos.

In his essay, "Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry," published in 1728, Alexander Pope quoted page after page of examples in which verse had gone wrong, because the writers had used bizarre, extended metaphors to give ordinary details and events an ersatz glow of "poetic" language.

The results are bloated and ridiculous poems in which too much is written about nothing much:

Who knocks at the door?

For whom thus rudely pleads my loud-tongu'd gate,
That he may enter?

See who is there?

Advance the fringed curtains of thy eyes,
And tell me who comes yonder.

Shut the door.

The wooden guardian of our privacy
Quick on its axle turn.

Bring my clothes.

Bring me what nature, tailor to the bear,
To man himself deny'd; she gave me cold,
But would not give me clothes.

Light the fire.

Bring forth some remnant of Promethean theft,
Quick to expand th' inclement air, congeal'd
By Boreas's rude breath.

Snuff the candle.

Yon' luminary amputation needs,
Thus shall you save its half extinguish'd life.

Open the letter.

Wax! render up thy trust.

Uncork the bottle, and chip the bread.

Apply thine engine to the spungy door:
Set Bacchus from his glassy prison free,
And strip white Ceres of her nut-brown coat.

Somehow, the writer of any narrative poem has to steer between these two pot holes.

It can be done, if the writer is willing to economize. Stripping the narrative down to its essential details to remove the empty baggage of most fiction; seeking appropriate metaphors and imagery for the most important moments and moods of the story, while letting the unimportant ones pass by as quickly as possible; trusting the reader to infer the number "four" when offered "two plus two" -- all of these approaches might work.

To make them work remains a challenge, and one that I am failing.

Dead On The Page

Despair at your own first drafts can arise from a lack of self-confidence, but can also creep up on you because you live by aesthetic standards.

You can trick your idiot mind into self-confidence, but no degree of self-delusion can fool you into mistaking trash for treasure.

What Is Heritage?

I see heritage as less of a longing for a cultural golden past, than a series of conversations over time with people of yesterday. Because the intent of these conversations is not to create a golden age for tomorrow, but to navigate the complexities of life as it is today, these people have won the right to be heard; they, too, confronted the challenges of their day with open eyes, and what they learned in the process deserves our consideration and our memory.

Tested Over Time

Whenever I take a shallow online test to determine my political positions, I always end up in the same corner: extreme left, extreme libertarian. Yet despite this, I am very much a cultural conservative, because I believe that tradition is an open doorway into the past, where methods of art were beaten into shape like bronze, and tested over centuries. I believe, as well, that traditional methods can be used to test my own abilities, to show what I can do within and against a framework that has remained steady over time. Without such a framework, how could I judge myself? How could I correct myself, whenever I fall short or fall apart?


What I do not believe is that everyone must be tested against this framework, that everyone must embrace the traditions I love.

I have my own preferences, and they guide me whenever I try to read, to watch, to hear something new. There are many works of today that I love, and many more that I find opaque, but these are my responses. If I am unable to understand why certain people write or compose or paint or direct in certain ways, I try to contrast their methods with methods that work for me, so that I can understand why something might not communicate, but I do this for myself. I am not a critic; I am, instead, a technician. I do not want to tell others what they should or should not enjoy; I want, instead, to understand the methods that appeal to me, so that I can use them for my own purposes.

So yes: I am left, I am libertarian. I am also culturally conservative, but the methods I conserve are for me, and for what I hope to do.