Don's Blog -Poetry

Several years ago I was invited into a Poetry group at the Green Center in University City. Despite its pretentious name,

The Green Center Tea Society,   I went and was hooked. The teacher was Chris Farenthold, who taught poetry at a local college. 

He awakened my interest in an area of literature of which I was unaware. We read his selected poems and discussed them.

We also learned about poetry itself. Here is one of his contributions.

from "The Poem as Journey"

by Charles Wright

"Poems are not just about journeys, of course, they are journeys. Like any organism, the good poem is a self-contained adventure, 

both physically and metaphysically … without the interior journey the exterior one is impossible. (32)

At the heart of every poem is a journey of discovery. Something is being found out. Often the discovery is merely technical. …

From time to time the discovery is spiritual, a way of looking at the world that affects the way we lead our lives, or how we think of them.

Poems that cause us to say, after having read them, "Oh, that's nice," or "Ummm, not bad," do not participate in this voyage of discovery. 

No matter how new their paint job is, no matter how sharp and crisp their sails, they never get out of the harbor. The journey belongs to others.

(32-3)

There is a kind of spatial negation, a visual power in absence that painters understand and employ, and which I'm interested in poetically.

Its a sort of white hole that has a kinetic draw to it that the lines of the poem float on and resist. Part of my interest in the dropped line for

me is that it sets up for me a bit of this power field within the line itself; a rhythmic jolt sometimes might appear, small as it is, that kicks the line and the poem along , keeping it alive over the top of a force that would founder and sink it at any time. But everybody knows this. You

keep the composition apart just a little to let this energy in and to, and to let the poem in and out of the energy generated by this emptiness.It's all about the same thing, the power  and domination of what's not there, the energy of absence. (173)"

Here is an example of "dropped lines":

  A dropped line is a line which is broken into two lines, but where the second part is indented to remain sequential visually. For example, in the poem "The Other Side of the River" by Charles Wright, the first and second lines form a dropped line, as do the fourth and fifth lines:

  It's linkage I'm talking about,

  and harmonies and structures,

  and all the various structures that lock our wrists to the past.

  Something infinite after everything appears,

      and then disappears.

  — Charles Wright, The Other Side of the River

So,  those dropped lines and indentations are part of the purposeful structure of the poem - very interesting for a neophyte.