Experimental Poetics of Narrative For some 100 years now, American poets have been experimenting with many different ways of arranging words, and have traveled so deep into the labyrinth of language that word games themselves have become the intense focus of brilliant minds. While reviewing all these methods of arranging words, non-linear narrative, non-grammatical fragments, clusters of visual imagery, I have developed for myself a simple poetics to employ language for exploring complex concepts of sociology, psychology, history, physics, and anthropology through aesthetic expression. I designed for my own use a simple set of rules for writing poetry that I love to read. Using complete grammatical sentences, I tell stories about human beings by setting a scene, establishing a landscape, describing a person, and dramatizing action, which all provides a framework for personal expression of various characters as they perceive and try to understand themselves and the environment where they find themselves struggling to survive, and decide how to act. In other words I imitate the source: Homer. The Greeks had been experimenting with story-telling for centuries since the Muses first began development of narrative and established the Museum as a school for teaching singers and presenting stories. Homer did not spring from nothing, rather he developed his simple and elegant style of using language to tell stories about people from centuries of experimentation. In essence, tell a story about people understanding themselves and their world through beautiful musical language in verse.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 11:47:30 +0000