I have heard artists of various
stripes say that ranking their pieces is akin to ranking their children. I found this to be true; it is very difficult
for me to pick my favorite, whereas, the worst is a constant nagging noise in
the back of my head that will not leave me alone. That being said let me start
with the worst.
Early on in this project, the fourth week,
the current president was a candidate that many of us thought was
unelectable. Regardless, he was gaining
some popularity and I thought we should write something about him. It failed, hugely. It was bad enough that in my write up about
the writing I admitted that it was both not funny and that it was probably a
swing and a miss. I tried using actual
Trump quotes and placing them in a false interview with a pretty snarky
interviewer. Reading it now, it looks
like the kind of thing that a middle or high school kid would piece together
when they first started becoming politically aware. That is, there was an idea of understanding
of the problems, but no solutions. There
was no real handling of the problems I was trying to highlight, just sarcastic comments
about them. The bottom line is it was
ill conceived and poorly written. I
don’t think I imagined I was going to change anyone’s minds about Trump, so I’m
not really sure what I was thinking. It
was the kind of piece that at best would land with half of the readers, and
that’s only if it’s done well, which it wasn’t.
I heard an interview recently
where a songwriter responded to the compliment that one of his songs had “great
lyrics” with “not great but clever.” I think at the beginning I thought the
idea was clever, but even as it was published, I knew it was not good,
definitely not great, and not even clever.
Those of us who were there talk about it like one might talk about a
terrible car accident that they were in; we’re still alive, but we don’t really
have anything else good to say about.
It’s harder for me to pick my
favorite. I’ve managed to narrow it down
to two pieces that I am fairly proud of.
The first was the conflict ballade, Ballade
of the Flood, from May of last year.
More than a year of writing later, this could still be my favorite poem.
I managed to capture the imagery and idea and execute the form well. I prefer strictly formed poems to free verse,
and I’m pretty proud of this one. It was
hard writing and in my commentary, I mention that I started with four different
concepts before settling on the final idea.
Sometimes poetry flows, sometimes it’s an uphill climb. This was a climb, but I think it’s better for
it or at least I appreciate the result more because it was such a challenge.
The second piece is A Dark Solace from May of this year
(maybe May is just a good month for poetry.)
This one was not a climb; it was not a fight. It flowed quickly, I knew the ideas I wanted
to use and the words fell easily into rhythm.
At this point, we had stopped doing commentary on the project blog, so I
don’t have a record of the exact process, but I remember the editing of the
poem after I had flown through the original draft. There was specific word
choices that I changed and I added punctuation (something I comment about
intentionally not doing in the ballade.) Also, although it follows a strict
form, it is not a fixed form. I picked
the form and my instruction was a poem, written in sestets, at least X amount
of stanzas, envoi is allowable. So, this
seems more like my own work than many poems written in a fixed form and I find
myself very attached to it. Also, the
poem is about depression, something that I have dealt with intermittently for
most of my adult life. That makes it
more personal to me and, although I don’t think good art needs to be about personal
issue, I think in this case it helps.
So, that’s that. Like children, it’s much easier to find the
worst than the best, disappointments are heavy and there’s a lot of mediocrity
in the middle. Overall, I wouldn’t give
the project up for anything, but next time I get the urge to write about a living
politician, I might instead carefully construct a performance piece
allegorically bashing my head into a brick wall.
The links to my top two are below,
I am not including a link to the Trump piece, if you want to dig it up, you
can, but for my money, it’s best left buried.
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