Elbow Room for the Imagination

I got my first computer about 15 years ago and immediately hooked up with AOL. For those of you who remember, the net was very different back then. For a few months I rummaged around the AOL sites until I stumbled upon an AOL sponsored chat room called "Poet's Place." The room had a moderator who would schedule poetry readings by IM from those wishing to do so. After each reading, the floor was open for comments.

Now I enjoy all kinds of literature, but poetry seemed particularly appropriate for that type of setting. I became a follower of Poet's Place for some years, and once in a while took a turn a moderator. I even got a chance to meet in person some of the people who frequented the room. They were a great bunch and I still contact some of them from time to time, even though Poet's Place is no longer active. It was all a lot of fun.

But as far as the poetry was concerned, frankly, most of it was pretty bad. However it occurred to me early on that even though the people who posted poems in the room were not very skilled at writing, still, they had something in common with the best of writers in any genre. This is the urge to reveal a unique, personal vision. I always tried to keep this in mind when rendering a comment, and therefore refrained from being too critical. Essentially, I tried to find whatever was good in each poem and cite that as a nucleus upon which a better poem could be constructed. In time, I began to recognize a near universal flaw in most of the poems.

Now it is never wise nor prescient to subject poetry, or any other art form for that matter, to immutable laws. As soon as we do that, someone like a James Joyce or a Paul Klee comes along to shatter those laws and give us a vision not only of undeniable brilliance, but also a brilliance of a kind which cannot be reduced to the standards ordinary people believe define what is art and what is not. So consider this only as advice. If it works for you, send me a percentage.

Beginning writers are told, incessantly, that the key to successful writing is to engage the reader. This seems so basic a principle that most writers sheerly assume an understanding of it. Yet saying you understand something and knowing how to put it into practice can be two very different things.

Consider a piece of creative writing as a series of stepping stones across a pond. When the stones are wide and close together, you cross over the water without any effort, hardly thinking about it. But when they are narrow and scattered haphazardly, crossing requires concentration and agility.

What I discovered in nearly all those bad poems were writers, so infatuated by their own imagination, that they completely ignored that of the reader. It was almost insulting. When they screamed, cried or laughed, they told you precisely why and in annoyingly painful detail. What they were forgetting is that reading a story is as much an act of imagination as writing it is.

If you think about it, Van Gogh's "Field of Flowers near Arles" virtually demands the viewer's participation. The genius of that painting is not what is there, but what isn't. Similarly, Eliot's "Prufrock" has inspired thousands of interpretations. That we all see something different in these disparate works of art is a measure of how the artist has managed to pull us into them. Perhaps the greatness of Van Gogh was not exactly how he saw things, but the reverence he had for how you see them. Maybe, it is this reverence which transforms ordinary fields, or life stories, into enduring works of art.

When you are finished writing, set your pen down, take a turn around the block, drink a cup of coffee or smoke a cigarette, then go back and read what you have written as if it was composed by a total stranger. And ask, has this person left enough space between the stones to exercise my legs as well as their own?

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Chris Rhetts says about himself (pictured left with daughter Morgan):

I am a 59 year old, relatively normal person living in Acworth, GA (a lake community just north of Atlanta). A friend of mine from church and I maintain a blog, writing about current affairs. I fear we are in fact just a couple of garrulous old gasbags.

I got my B.A. with a major in Comparative Literature at Indiana University way back in 1973. I wanted to go on and get a Masters in education but things just didn't turn out the way I hoped and I find myself years later selling cars for a living. I've never published anything or claim to be an authority on writing. I've had occasion however to read and comment on reams of writing by amateurs like myself. As a result of that experience I think I have some useful ideas about creative writing.

[...]

I love to write all sorts of things and I think I am fairly good at it. I decided very early on, as a boy in fact, that I would write things to please myself. It was never my intention or aim to become a published writer. My first love is poetry. I also write little short stories and commentaries.