Here's a tip for new writers, or any writer struggling with a poem: recast.
Let's say you are trying to write a poem, have developed a complete draft of it that has shape and movement, form and development, but it doesn't satisfy. The poem sounds forced, insincere, derivative (even of your own way of thinking and feeling!), unbelievable. And you don't believe it.
This is where I left off with the draft of a poem described in the previous post (3.17.23) in this blog. That draft was written as a villanelle and adhered pretty much to the form's requirements (in English) of 5-foot lines of largely iambic pentameter and an a-b-a rhyme scheme with repeating first and third lines.
I realized that I was committing the same error that I used to lecture my W@1 cohorts about, regarding rhyme: I was writing to complete the rhyme, not the sense; I was sacrificing the art to the figure. This affected content development in turn, effectively blocking me from any fresh thinking about where to take the next line: I worked to get to the line-end rhyme, no matter what the line actually said in relation to the lines before or after.
This predicament occurs often when I am trying to develop content through some device or other: a rhyme scheme, a stanzaic progression, a metrical footprint. I force myself into a framework that works against thought and feeling.
When you're caught in this kind of bind, all the drafting and redrafting in the world won't do a thing to break you and your poem free. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody that if you continue writing the same formula that produces a weak poem, you will only arrive at that weakness. The same track leads to the same destination again and again.
How to break free of this? Get off the old track. Take a new track. Get off track altogether and go off-road for a while. It always works!
So over the past 24 hours, I dispensed with the idea of writing a villanelle. I jammed all the lines of the draft together into a block of undifferentiated "prose" without end-stopped lines with rhymes and without the affectation of meter or syllable count. I dispensed with "form," for a draft or two, anyway.
The result? I now have a new draft that has "form," but a more organic form than before: two stanzas of equal length whose lines are roughly the same syllabically and rhythmically for the most part, though with occasional short lines and two somewhat longer lines. I italicize to emphasize that this draft avoids strictness in the sense of a traditional form. It assembles more organically, according to the rhythms, pitches, images, and ideas unfolding as the draft builds. It's possible, maybe even preferable, that a further draft will de-emphasize even the two equal stanzas or the roughly equal line lengths. Or this may not be necessary.
I found that by dropping the formal requirements, I was able to generate new information in the poem, and especially to develop a closing line that doesn't feel forced or "arrived at," even though it is. It's just that the content and voice now dictate where the poem begins (same as before), flows, turns and ends, not the strictures of the villanelle form.
So, for you writers who are stuck drafting a poem, are you doggedly trying to stick to some format (a rhyme scheme, a stanzaic structure, a line length, a metrical footprint, a repetitive pattern), hoping that that will deliver you to the art you want to create? Are you finding that the same ideas, thoughts and feelings that haven't been cohering for you keep coming up as you re-draft? STOP following the form! Drop the technical braces (or step off the technical path) and walk free. You may stumble or teeter or even fall flat. You may become lost for a spell. But you might also find the voice and the idea(s) and the art that your insight, eye or ear (or all these) has been looking for.
Instead of redrafting, revise - revision meaning exactly what it says: seeing things differently.
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