Possibilities
I make poems as if I were following the rules of a game.
But the sounds of words play no part in it. I almost never consider the audial nature of language — not when making thoughtful decisions. Things like puns that make an appearance through the parallel surfaces of words share the most random connections. I feel they are the least likely to level reflections of any depth. The same goes with rhyming. A poetry handbook might, for instance, point at the way wall and fall rhyme in one stanza, intimating that they are placed in such positions in a poem in order to underscore their connection, because there is meaning to be had when you fall off a wall.
But then, that is an English phenomenon, which immediately implies that the verbal artists from another language might not connect those two ideas in the same way because they would not rhyme in the same way in their own language. So falling off a wall seems to have a peculiarly English significance.
No, my poems would have nothing to do with such incidental coincidences. Instead of following the beats of a language, they follow the rhythm of situations. Yes, this is like prose. But such poetry would not simply be formed by paragraphs. I play with the rules of sentences and come up with new things. I use the following tenets to make my plain sentences into poems:
- A poem should be presented before you in its entirety; so, it should be no longer than a page, or at least no more than two facing pages.
- If prose is composed of paragraphs and sentences, and poems of stanzas and lines, my poems would have one foot in each camp. It would be stanzas that are made up of sentences.
- In such a basic structure as three stanzas, you could still make other configurations. You can have multiple paragraphs inside a stanza by having all paragraphs that follow the first one inside a stanza indented. In this way, you can have three parts to a one-page poem formed by stanzas that each hold more than one paragraph.
- There are other possibilities. In this type of system, you could write a poem that is only constructed of one-sentence stanzas, underscoring the line by having it more visible.
- Another one is that of writing one solid stanza as a poem. A slight deviation from this would be making the stanza have multiple indented paragraphs, which would adhere to straight-forward prose — and hence, look nothing like a poem.
- Of course, you could make three or four or five stanzas without interior indentations and leave it at that.
- Or each stanza could be made up of two sentences. Each sentence could be a separate paragraph. If the first paragraph is not indented, and the second one is, the prose poem made up of such “couplets” would naturally look like a poem (but only at first glance), even if it follows all the rules of mundane grammar.
- Rhythm could be established by number of sentences per stanza, as well as by types of sentence structures, as well as by depicted situation, as well as by the occasional repetition.
- If it is one poem per page or two facing pages, the pages in the poetry book might look monotonous. One way around this is having some of the poems have no title. Some could have a number or symbol to introduce it. Poems could also have bold subtitles above each stanza. Coupled poems could appear on the same page. Unrelated tiny poems could do the same thing. Some poems could start halfway down the page, which would diametrically mirror the shorter poems that finish halfway up the page.
- In addition to these basic rules, I invite a few auxiliary possibilities. Sentences can be numbered, for instance. And in the interests of lists, two or three columns in one page comprised of two- or three-word sentences can be allowed now and again, when I’m in the mood.