Category: poetry

I write when I write

Karl Elvis1 Comment

So much for writing every day right?

Fuck it though, I write when I write and I feel like I have something to say

Lately, what i’ve felt like I needed to say has more to do with longing and loss than anything else, for reasons that are both incredibly complicated and not strictly my story to tell, though in fact I think I could simply say it all, since the number of people reading is less than fingers I have on one hand.

But today – inspired by the incredible Journey Chase, what I really want to be writing about is raw, brutal sex. Because she does that to me, consistently. She makes me react, physically, mentally, emotionally. She makes me want to write poetry (which one day i’ll figure out), and to write erotica (which I can obviously do, well, when I am able to get the time). She makes me want other things as well, but, well, that’s not what i’m here to talk about.

Alas today, at least, thus far, work remains a huge drain on my creative energy, so erotic writing will have to wait a bit.

For now, know i’m thinking about these things and hope to have more lurid updates in immediate future.

You will have to wait for it, though. No, I don’t like waiting, either.

 

 

 

WTF is it with poetry

Karl Elvis3 Comments

what the fuck is it with poetry?

It’s a form I fundamentally don’t feel, as a writer.

Not that I don’t love it – lyrics of songs and bits of poetry are in my head all the time. Things from tolkien, from ogden nash, from james thurber, from andy partridge, steven wilson, lloyd cole, phil lynott. Words that move me and capture me.

But when I write – fiction at least – I hear narrator voice in my head, which is why I write the way I do, in character, with that characters voice ringing in my skull.

This isn’t something I learned in school. It’s something I do by instinct, like a musician playing by ear.

But verse – it escapes me. I can’t hear it, feel it, do it by instinct. It’s like an intuitive jazz player trying to play in a symphony, without being able to read the charts. They may find the notes that make sense, but they won’t grasp where they are supposed to fit with a hundred other instruments.

I look at work by poets I admire, and I see what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and I react. But I don’t understand why they do what they do.

Why the line break here, and not there? Why this may beats on a line? Are they hearing some drumbeat, heartbeat, some rhythm i’m not party to? Is there an invisible template?

I need to talk to poets about poetry, which somehow sounds so beatnik I want to get out my beret and snap my fingers. I need to hear them read out loud, maybe, or to understand how they chose a form (or if the form choses them, perhaps, as a character speaking in my head; I just listen to them, they speak to and through me).

I read things that inspire, and I try to do what they do, and to date, my tries and lyrics and poetry always wind up awkward and unfinished.

I need the why.