These are some of my favourite views. They lift me out of myself and somehow make me feel healed and whole again.
They all have one essential ingredient within them, the element of water. Water falling in a mountain valley, a lovely river which sometimes flows sedately through pretty little riverside towns and sometimes rushes and tumbles through rocky valleys, the creation of a waterfall within Kew Gardens and finally the immense sparkling gun metal sea as an autumn evening is falling.
There is something magical about water but also something fearful and sobering. It is beautiful and magnetic and is essential to all life but also immense and overpowering with tragic consequences.
Kim
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Kkimm
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Thanks so much for your really encouraging comments. They mean far more to me than you could realise.
I really enjoyed listening to the Philip Larkin poem also.
I have had a go at turning water into a poem. Tell me honestly what you think.
The lines have been messed up by the changes which are made automatically when we post.
You perhaps can see where they were meant to be by where I put capital letters. It was also divided into 3 verses which are lost.
If you like I will message it to you again as it was meant to be. However I have not studied the structure of poetry and have probably not got it right anyway.
If you feel like it, tell me what you think it is saying apart from the really obvious.
I may have ago at doing some of the others into poetry also.
Oh yes, I think I see where the HU auto-formatting messed with the line arrangement. Is "Water" at the beginning the first line, title, or (as is the case with many poems) both? I think one way to solve the stanza break issue would be to put a period (.) on a line by itself to separate the verses as you would like them to appear. When you do get a free moment (I know you've got lots going on at the house), would you be able message me a draft of the poem with those stanza breaks so indicated with a period, as I would like to be sure to see the poem as you saw and felt it -- that is far and away more important than any studied structure (to my mind, at least)?
It was fascinating to see how seamlessly your prose translated to verse! Are you familiar with prose poetry? There are passages from many of your posts that I think would make good material for such poems, without even breaking a line!
As pleased as I was to see that you retained much of the imagery, I think you augmented it quite well with touches like the "green willows, yellow king cups, / And flash of scarlet kingfisher," adding strokes of color, as a painter might with flicks of a brush.
Beyond what you conveyed in the original post, I felt the poem elaborated what was hinted at in the last paragraph, starting with the line, "But when out of place and unimpeded..." From there, the poem made me think of levees breaking during a flood that follows a massive storm, and the devastation that accrues; specifically, it made me think of the destruction and loss of life that occurred as a result of Hurricane Katrina that hit the U.S. in 2005.
Also, I was struck by the line "A destroying angel," as it recalled one of your earlier posts about mushrooms. I'll have to have a think on the symbolism there.
I sincerely hope you find more poems in your prose or even, as Larkin's trees "seem to say, / Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."
Thank you for giving such a beautiful and helpful reply. Loved your imagery of my imagery of an artist adding "strokes of colour with flicks of a brush" Beautiful.
I am sure that you are right that conveying what a poet sees and feels is more important than studied structure but I do feel disabled by a lack of understanding of how to write poetry in the sense of use of structure. That is probably why I chose on the whole to write prose. Do tell me what a prose poem is when you get time.
I think you summed it up well in your most recent reply to "Trees" in saying that my posts convey the heart of a poet. At least I would like to believe you in that and think I do. I think I have things to say and to a certain extent the language to say them but lack the knowledge of how to use the medium of poetry to say them in.
I think I would benefit from studying it as a medium. It would also help me understand your advice and comments more. I will do a little bit of research into the basics.
My novel is a serious topic and uses the understanding and knowledge I have gained from a life time working in social care, particularly child welfare and child protection as first a social worker then later a manager for Local Authorities in the UK. My later years were in very stressful trouble shooting contract roles. To an extent these contributed to me becoming ill with GAD and depression. However I speak the language and have the tools for the topic of the novel I am writing. I want to contribute to knowledge on the subject with my novel.
Subjects I studied to any depth are Sociology, child psychology, management of welfare etc. I stopped studying English at GCE level which is achieved by young people at age 16 but have always enjoyed English Literature and Language.
Your advice is really helpful and any comments you want to make on structure of my poems, if and when I write them, would be very welcome. I would not be offended by this sort of advice.
I wonder if you are a lecturer or professor in English literature or if you have just gained your knowledge from a personal interest in it over the years.
Any comments I make on your poems which I find beautiful, are not from a position of knowledge as you know, just from the feelings they evoke in me.
I am reasonably well read and do enjoy alot of poetry, largely again from the feelings it evokes. I like Keats, Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Masefield, Robert Frost, to name but a few. My favourite authors include DH Lawrence, Dickens, the Brontes, Jane Austen all of whom I am passionate about as well as certain modern novelist such as Sebastian Faulkes and Ian McEwan which give me such immense reward that I constantly await new novels by them. As you can tell, I am much better read from novels than poetry.
I am similar in my reactions to art and music which I love also but in an even more untutored way. I do however sing in a community choir and am pondering on a post about that soon. I love it to distraction but definitely feel a fraud compared to others with real good voices.
I have just spent most of this morning enjoying book illustrators and artists new to me on Pinterest, Omar Ryyan for example as well as looking at old favourites, Anton Pieck, Gustave Dore, Fuesli, Arthur Rackham etc.
Sorry this is getting very long as usual, and certainly probably not much interest to most people, who will have given up on it long ago.
I will leave it for a few days to answer your PM properly and say more about your beautiful poems.
Have a Happy new year and keep on writing, it would be wonderful to read one of your poems that uses imagery or the reality of the black seal pup in my photos.
There's much I want to write in reply to you, so I will reserve most of what I want to say for private messages. However, I did want to try and clarify what I said about "studied structure" of poetry in my previous comment, as I think I came across as dismissive of having an understanding of verse structure, which couldn't be further from what I believe.
Though I have to admit, I bristle at the idea of studying poems themselves (I'm a big believer in reading and/or writing poetry purely for pleasure and emotional connection), I also feel that an understanding of prosody and versification is important and useful in both the reading and writing of poetry. Books on the art and craft of poetry have long fascinated me, and I read (and re-read) them regularly -- in fact, I'm more than happy to recommend some, if you like -- they are such great resources. In them, you'll probably find a much better definition for prose poetry than I could provide (though I think it's fair to say that they are essentially pieces of poetic prose, or prose that feature the elements of poetry, except line break).
I guess what I wanted to say with my "studied structure" comment was something akin to what I heard a fellow poet and friend once say: "The only rule is that there are no rules." Now, personally, I would amend this a bit and say: "There are no rules...but the ones of your own making." The fact that you read poetry means that you already have an intuitive grasp of form and structure, though you may not yet be familiar with the nomenclature and such (I believe we absorb so much unconsciously from reading poetry). And while I heartily agree with you that it is helpful to be familiar with the vocabulary of versification when discussing it, and beneficial to know how structure has been and can be used in verse, I also think it important to be mindful of not being hemmed in by it artificially when writing. I hope you will discover poetic form to be as liberating as I have found it to be over the years.
I will try to write more soon in private message, as there are many things from your comment to which I wish to respond. As I mentioned in a previous message, my mental and physical health problems often elongate the writing process for me, so I may reply in short bursts, addressing single topics at a go in order to respond in a more timely fashion.
As always, I appreciate your patience, and continuing to correspond with me despite my long silences.
John
P.S. Forgive my ignorance, but what kind of foliage is that covering the cottage in the picture on the upper right of the collage?
Very true lovely picturesque so refreshing and relaxing flow states of tranquility listening to the ripples and the calmness energising Brings relise . a sense of drifting away awaking peaceful thoughts and reflection of mindfulness
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