My Theory of Poetics

One of my problems with being a slow adopter of new technology is that I often find myself feeling like a virgin sacrifice.

Welcome to my blog.

You can be the volcano.

When I was studying English Literature so many years ago, one of the things that I got a serious kick from was the concept of "The Theory of Poetics." I had a textbook that has long since been either given away, lost in a move, or relegated to cold storage called 20th Century Poetry and Poetics. In it, clever Canadian poets (and maybe some others, I don't recall recall recall), offered their particular theories of how poems are created... how they dream them up.

The theories are mostly very long.

Luckily, the one I came up with is short. And it has stayed with me ever since I read that book for the first time almost 20 years ago.

And this is it (it's really simple):

Inside every person (not just every poet, but every single person everywhere) there is a core of passionate, wondrous, poetry waiting to be released. And every day, we all accumulate lines of bad poetry that cover that core and make it harder to extract. The poet's job is to write out that bad poetry at a rate which is greater than the rate it accumulates.

Simple, yes? So if living a day of my life generates 5 lines of bad poetry, and I have, in my lifetime, written 7500 poetic lines, then the calculation would look something like this:


5 (lines of poetry)

x 13,362 (days in my life so far)

- 7,500 (already written lines)

= 59,310


Today, there are 59,310 lines of bad poetry remaining to be extracted. Assuming I write none of it out today, tomorrow's line-sum will rise to 59,315, and so on.

If you know me, you might be inclined to attribute this theory to an early Purgatory fetish from one or more of the Catholic schools in my past. Maybe that's true. Maybe not.

At any rate, now that you know the theory, I hope that you'll have, if nothing else, a very clear understanding that you're under no obligation to actually read the bad poetry. At times I expect it'll seem pretty random. At the same time, however, you'll appreciate that I have to write it. I would like to see what's under all these lines some day, and time's a wastin'.

I'll keep a running count, but this might take a while.