Seemingly Unaided

by Suzanne Saporito (guest blogger)

I don’t know much about the formalities of poetry. I don’t know much about meter. The iambic and the penta meters will never stick within me so that I can express their ways to you. I can’t tell the difference between a metaphor or simile while I’m writing unless I look them up in a dictionary. Nor can I define the repeating sounds rhymes make within a lines delivery and truly, I don’t think much about it.

 

I don’t write the piece, the piece writes for me. It writes the emotions that are creeping in my bones. The ones that come from an autumn breeze or from a lone leaf falling, breathing its last hoorah, triggering my poetic song. The verse is born from the ethereal realms of my being. I’ve always found it so fascinating. Free flowing and moving with no thought to have brought me to its place, until the day I was told that poetry had structure. My response to that information was “Get Out of Here”. But it was true, and wow did I have a hard time with it.

Let me take you to my beginnings with form and my journey in the unaided ways of working with poems and structure. My first, and still most loved form is Rubaiyat. It has an unbalanced beauty to its fall and frustrated my free falling poetic mind, that I lost my way trying to count syllables (8989) and then casting more doubt into its rhyming lines (aaba)… What is that?, I said “you’ve got to be kidding me”. I became so disturbed by the strict, straight and narrow that I lost my way and found myself in the emptiness where no muse would gather to share her light.

Each line was forced under the strain of keeping time and rhyme, I was frazzled. Then a friend introduced me to Fitzgerald’s translations of Omar Khayyam (Rubaiyat) and he told me to just read them. Wow, the poetic spirit of the poems spoke to me and shined. Each small four lined piece of magic was ingrained in my person, not memorized, but captured like a photograph, except I captured the flow and fall of the piece. I found my way in the poem and the poem taught me not by the numbers that were laid in the count of syllables, but where the meter fell naturally and then the rhyme followed suit.

Every form has its song in its poetic workings, and yes I know now that there are words to define them, but its the melody of the poem that allows the write to come to structure. So I let sail the way of the form, I didn’t count a number just moved into the rhythm of the form, unaided by any direction given just the rhythm…. After that I go back over the piece an pick and weed, change and conform, Try it…. find a form that you know of or don’t know of. Unaided by any structural direction, read the poem till its meter sinks in your person. Then write where the music of poetry takes you. Sometimes its the soul of a poet that puts the melody of the form into play, seemingly unaided.

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