CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Lack of Rules Kills Art

Thursday, June 16, 2011

this entry brought to you by dntel, "dumb luck"


I haven't written anything in years, but I am a writer of poetry. Which isn't to say that I'm a lover of poetry-- I'm not. I like my own work a good deal, but I hate other people's poetry, because most people's work is complete crap. When poetry was breaking out of the static forms of rhyming and iambic pentameter and rhythm and all that, when the poets began writing in a looser, freer flowing form, I felt that's what killed poetry. I've never really agreed with it.

I rhyme in my poetry, I use rhythm-- my poems aren't so much written as they are built. I've always felt that limiting myself to rhyming has made me more creative. People who also fancy themselves poetry writers but who use free verse say to me, oh, rhyming is so stifling. But when I have no rules, to me what I'm writing isn't anything. It's just thoughts on a sheet of paper. I've always felt that way. I always excelled when I had limitations and boundaries, when it comes to poetry, and worked within those boundaries.

Recently I was listening to some comedians muse about creativity, and actually it was Sarah Silverman's sister, Laura Silverman, that said this: creativity is only creative when it has rules. If there are no rules, what you're doing isn't creative, it is just a thing. If there are no boundaries, you're not creating, you're playing. Which is fine if that's your intention, but it isn't very entertaining to see somebody just play forever. What makes something work is if there are boundaries and limits. You say, okay, these are the limits-- how do I push them, how do I work within them? And that's the definition of creativity. And I'm completely inclined to agree. I've always felt that free verse is just some words. And I think free verse has killed poetry and made it uninteresting to the masses. If someone says "anything is art", then anyone starts to think they can make art, and that anything they do is art, and it's just uninteresting crap.
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with love from CRS @ 1:25 PM 

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