In the mix of all the mess of the past month and finishing the video and then moving directly into my traditional nervous breakdown, I have been steadily studying some very old “teachings,” not forms, about poetry in preparation for writing the city of love and just in general to take another step forward.

Painted on the wall of my studio is a very distilled version of Longinus’s “Rules of the Sublime” which, for the first time, I tried to apply when writing “Striking a Match.”

They are:

1) the power of grand conceptions
2) the inspiration of vehement emotions
3) proper construction of thought and speech
4) nobility of language
5) dignified and elevated word arrangement

In other words:

1) think big, outside of yourself, think of the world the universe and more
2) feel it to the absolute height and power of the emotions involved
3) now say it in a way that can be understood and believed as reality
4) choose words that respect or “dress” the concept and emotion
5) arrange the words so to carry the whole idea and not just the word or phrase

I also started working in a whole bunch of other stuff he writes about (and Aristotle too) about how to pace things, use metaphor, repeat words etc.

Its an ongoing process…but written on the wall opposite the rules of the sublime is the phrase “Tension is the great integrity.”

In other words, your words should hang suspended as if in something that only you know the outcome of but leaves the reader in the tension of uncertainty – how will this poem end? Will it be good? Will there be disaster? And you the poet, who knows, gives nothing away but builds each possibility equally before bringing them to the end.

But the end cannot be a surprise because of #3.

☺

The thing about the sublime and why it can make a poem good, is it echoes life. It is the process of balancing reason and emotion without giving up one or the other. If you have grand ideas, but no emotion – it is too cold and dry. All emotion and no idea, then it is a breathtaking rollercoaster that is forgotten in minutes. And either/or/and without a means of expressing them to others and maintain a respect to why it was originally written just undoes the whole damn thing.

I almost dare to say that I feel normal again (whatever that is for me). I wrote over 8,000 words about concrete yesterday, which is a bit much but I am trying to recover my finances from the video and upgrade my life.

And get back to studying all these things that were forgotten.

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