Hallucination of Majestic Elephants

COMING SOON

Hallucination of Majestic Elephants
Literary Buzz:

“Along the way many great writers have begun with poetry and Jeff Howe’s five books of poetry published to date are diverse, enjoyable and very collectable, he writes with soul, ‘....Majestic Elephants’ will stamp him as another one on his way.” A. Myrtle. Poetsview.com

"From what I've seen of the previews, this will be a humdinger!" ReviwerGuy

"Jeff Who?" New York Times

Say What?

I used to think writing was a good thing - you know, a way to express some creativity. But now I wonder. It has stirred up some sort of pot which was bubbling away in the background. Or I think it has. Maybe that pot would have stirred on its own with the passage of time.

I am 48, going on 49. For the last three years, or so, I have experienced middle age. Some would call it a crisis. I wouldn't go that far, for there is no real danger of anything beyond losing my mind. An argument can be made that that happened a long time ago (yes, self-deprecating sarcasm, sorry about that).

Despite there being no danger, there has been a hammering realization that aging is a reality. That the past is the past, separate from us, yet still attached. The future is no comfort because we now actually get a feeling of what it may be like with the degradation of certain bodily functions. The present is no friend as we use that time to consider both the future and the past. Middle age is a vortex, a desperate grab to hold on to what was and a furtive attempt to avoid heading down the dreaded hill.

I thought writing would benefit my attempts to record the past, to somehow rebreathe life back into it. I don't want to live in the past; just simply experience it again from time to time. Unfortunately, it's left me frustrated more than anything. It seems that I can't capture any of it in a manner which is realistic and fulfilling. I've tried with poetry. I've tried with fiction. I get glimpses of it now and then, but the sum totality of it all is missing.

I keep thinking that I just need the right combination of words to act as a key to unlock the chambers that hold the essence of what I seek. The search for the right combination has been fruitless, though, to a large extent. Additionally, there seems to be an attention deficit disorder lurking in the shadows that robs me of my will to keep searching. It's as if I sense a futility in the trying. It's also as if the task seems so daunting that I just can't see the point of attempting it.

Maybe there's a spot of laziness as well.

Now, I look back over what I have written here, and I see the ADD has taken over again. This has missed the mark of what I was attempting to do, and I have lost that thread already.

Just a part of getting older, I guess.

New Book

I have completed my third book of poetry. It is titled, The March of the Turtles.

Info is available at my website, thejeffhowe.com.

I will update my website when the book becomes available through major distribution channels such as Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com. The update will include the opportunity to purchase a signed book directly from me with a Paypal payment.

For all intents and purposes, as things stand now, I expect this will be my last book of poetry.

Aspiring Novelists, Take Heart!

I have read blogs and personal accounts from writers discussing their writing habits. It would seem that most of them have already knocked out about 100,000 words first thing in the morning before coffee - and that they do this every day of the week.

I don't know about you, but I find 2000 words a day difficult to do.

At this point in my writing experiment, my first novel has ground to a standstill at 43,000 words after a little over a year. It really stopped last April and hasn't resumed yet.

I've been writing, putting together more materials for two more books, short stories and poetry. But the big project has been bugging me from the back shelf I put it on last year.

However, I have found some information that gives me hope.

Joseph Heller started writing Catch-22 in 1953.

He didn't finish it until 1961.

That's 8 years.

Mark Twain started Huckleberry Finn in 1876.

He turned it all over to the typesetter in 1884.

That's 8 years.

What I'm writing has nothing near the scope of the two works I mentioned. And it won't be as good either, ha! But I think that I may actually be able to get it done before 8 years have passed.

Keep writing!

I Don't Know if This is True....

But I found it as funny as all get out!

A post on the Amazon message boards:

by W. R. Laney
How can you say that Emily Dickinson penned 'some of the finest poetry ever?' I thought the iambic pentameter got a little redundant but all of Emily's poetry can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas." Every one of them. It drives me crazy!

Good stuff there W.R. Great wit.

A Considerable Speck

This is a humorous poem by Robert Frost. It decries much of what was passing for poetry in his day.

A Considerable Speck
(Microscopic)

A speck that would have been beneath my sight
On any but a paper sheet so white
Set off across what I had written there.
And I had idly poised my pen in air
To stop it with a period of ink
When something strange about it made me think,
This was no dust speck by my breathing blown,
But unmistakably a living mite
With inclinations it could call its own.
It paused as with suspicion of my pen,
And then came racing wildly on again
To where my manuscript was not yet dry;
Then paused again and either drank or smelt--
With loathing, for again it turned to fly.
Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.
It seemed too tiny to have room for feet,
Yet must have had a set of them complete
To express how much it didn't want to die.
It ran with terror and with cunning crept.
It faltered: I could see it hesitate;
Then in the middle of the open sheet
Cower down in desperation to accept
Whatever I accorded it of fate.
I have none of the tenderer-than-thou
Collectivistic regimenting love
With which the modern world is being swept.
But this poor microscopic item now!
Since it was nothing I knew evil of
I let it lie there till I hope it slept.

I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.

What Exactly are the Rules of Poetry?

Poetry is like pornography in this respect - no one seems able to define it, but they know it when they see it. Poetry is an elusive concept for many. They think that if something is written in four-line verses, then it must be poetry. Or if it is written in short-line, truncated sentences, then that qualifies as well. Some seem to think that anything written about love or sex or flowers is poetry, while others think that making a list of single words will suffice. If you can make your political views about how you hate the President rhyme, then you must be a poet laureate! There are many readers out there who would certainly applaud you for it.

So are there rules regarding the writing of poetry? Yes.

And no.

If you are writing a Shakespearean sonnet, for instance, you would construct them with three four-line stanzas (called quatrains) and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameter, with the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg.

Iambic pentameter means a line with 5 iambic feet. Since each iamb is two syllables, that means each line should have ten syllables. Yet if you read enough sonnets, you will see that writers will break the "ten-syllable rule" at times.

Does this make it less of a sonnet? Of course not.

Let's take a look at punctuation.

I've run into some readers who will ding a writer left and right if they don't use punctuation. While I generally do use punctuation, there are times when what I write seems to defy its use. I will acquiesce to the demands of the piece and let it work on its own merit, and I'm OK with that. E.E. Cummings (sorry for the uppercase letters e.e. lol) either used punctuation in traditional and nontraditional ways or left it out altogether. He was about flaunting an anti-establishment approach to his work.

Would e.e. cummings be criticized for this experimental and bold approach? He probably was in his day, but he is now accepted for what he was - a groundbreaking poet.

So what about the rules of poetry?

Perhaps they are more like guidelines than rules, for they seem to be somewhat flexible.
However, they should not necessarily be tossed out with the bathwater.

There is at least one rule I can think of that is very pertinent to poetry.

That is this...

DON'T BORE THE READER.

10 Ways to Tell You have Entered an Online Poetry Workshop

1. The meter is tortured, the topic is banal, the rhyme is forced, but people are still cheering it and calling it awesome.

2. There is a preponderance of poems about fairies, unicorns and knights.

3. Reviews consist of only: "great job", "I really liked this" or "I don't get it".

4. There is a preponderance of poems about making love under trees beside a stream running through a golden field.

5. Love is always rhymed with above.

6. Much sighing and whispering going on in the poems.

7. People refer to a sonnet as free verse.

8. Site members are proud of their high rankings and fabricated titles.

9. People claim to be published poets because their work shows up in a poetry.com vanity publication.

10. There's not much good poetry to be found there.

On Online Poetry Sites

I have belonged to poets.com, bulldogpoetryworkshop.com, thepoetstree.com, and I currently belong to poetsinkwell.com and worldofpoets.com. Even with all this, I don't think I've really scratched the surface of the poetry sites available on the internet.

These sites allow you to post your work for others to read and review. In exchange, you are expected to read and review other people's works. It was an eye-opening process when I first started to do this, now it's mostly just amusing.

The first site I joined was poets.com. It is one of many sites owned by poetry.com which makes its money by publishing anthologies of contest winners (which is virtually everyone who submits) and selling them to the winners at $50 a pop. In other words, it's a vanity press with a twist.

Poets.com is a workshop of sorts where one pays a subscription fee to be a member. You can join for one month, three months or a year with the longer terms being gradually less expensive than the shorter when averaged per month. When I first joined poets.com, it was with the hopes of finding experienced, published poets who would be able to provide me feedback in this endeavor I had started. What a surprise when I went into the site as a paid member to see literally hundreds of Poet Laureates gracing the site.

In fact, I saw too many, which made me suspicious.

But I was willing to accept the possibility that a poetry site with as focused a name as poets.com might have a wealth of poetic knowledge and wisdom at its service, so I started looking at the works of the 'masters' there.

I read some work that I thought was mediocre and accepted the fact that not every piece written is a work of art. But as I plowed through the mediocrity and ran into absolutely hideous 'poetry', I began to realize that these erstwhile Laureates were not, in fact, Laureates at all. They were merely people who had been reviewed enough by others to receive the fairy tale title of Poet Laureate.

I learned the game quickly enough to become a Laureate myself, and a Judge Advocate as well (the reviewer's rank). It was just a matter of running the numbers. Just keep reviewing and getting reviewed and the ranks build up. This was not a game of substance, simply one of ego stroking.

You see, many of the folks that attained ranking on the site actually thought they were the equivalent of true Poet Laureates (not that all of them are that great). I read many a bio that sounded like Academy Award winners giving their acceptance speeches. It was always good for a chuckle.

Be warned, however, that a review leaning toward the negative could bring out the wrath of these people. "How dare you judge my work!", "You don't know anything about poetry!" and so on. That, too, was good for a chuckle as well.

The saving grace of this site was that I was able to find really good writers. They tended to be the quieter ones; there only for the writing and reading and reviewing. They didn't care for the titles or the silliness. I found excellent crafters of thought, metaphor, humor, in many styles, and I was always glad to call them friend. I still have the email addresses of some of them.

I am still involved with sites like this, though I left poets.com after their site redesign. Many from that site left as well, and I've run into them all across the spectrum. What I have concluded from my experiences is this...

1. These sites are really online communities, no more, no less. The flickr.com site is similar, only it deals with photographs instead of poems. Youtube is similar, but video-oriented. They are all communities with people meeting each other and interacting. The focus of the community is only a vehicle to draw like minded people together.

2. These sites are community-oriented, but they pander to ego as well, with the ability to build up points, tag favorites, award silly meaningless awards and such. There is a virtual plethora of people with no talent who consider themselves experts because enough people have stroked them for so long for whatever reason. The dynamics of it all are fascinating.

3. In every arena, you can find competence and true artistry. Sometimes it just takes some time and looking.

These sites can be enjoyable if one approaches them with the right attitude. In my opinion, the best way to do it is with a strong sense of humor and a willingness not to take any of it too seriously. Lord knows, too many get sucked into the fantasy of it all, and they feed off it. They should be pitied.

What is Poetry?

I have seen many people struggle with this. it would seem that poetry is actually rather difficult to define, yet we can usually identify it when iwe see it. Make sense? I have belonged to several poetry review websites. I currently don't hang my hat anywhere with regards to that, but my time spent at those sites has been interesting.

There seems to be many ideas about what constitutes poetry. There are some who say that if you write something from the heart it is poetry. Well, I can write the words, "I hate my mother!" (in actuality I love my mom, but go with me on this example) and mean it straight from the heart. But I wouldn't call it poetry. Would you? I believe I have seen some people who probably would. Remember, if the criteria is to write something with emotion, then anything should suffice, right? Wrong.

Then there are some people who think that a mish mash of nonsense words thrown together equates to poetry, and there I would disagree again. In fact, I would emphatically state that it is not poetry, but merely people trying to mimic what they believe poetry should be ala abstract art. But what about The Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll? As nonsensical as it may seem due to the words coined by Carroll, it is actually a strictly structured poem that creates an thought thread, has a beginning, a middle and an end. It is metered, has rhythm. It is a poem.

Then others may point out the work of E.E. Cummings as a sort of reference for "abstract" poetry. But once again, there's far more to Cummings than meets the plebian eye.

When poets forsook traditional, classic structure and style for more experimental types of poetry, this opened up a whole new world to people who couldn't be bothered to work the meter and rhyme. They justified what they did as good because poetry no longer needed to rhyme, nor did it require assonance or consonance - it could be whatever they wanted it to be. There is a grain of truth to that, but it still isn't necessary poetry. Or if it is, it's not good poetry. The same thing happened with "abstract expressionism" in the art world. With its advent, it freed up people to simply fling paint at a canvas and call it good. You see, it is supposed to reflect something deeply emotional for that person and, as such, becomes sacrosanct. You are not supposed to criticize it. The same holds true with freeverse.

Here's the thing. There is good abstract art just as there is good freeverse. But they still have to follow certain rules to make them effective. Throwing out the rules because one is either unwilling or just too lazy to learn those rules will always be revealed in that person's work. Or should I say lack of work? Because real creativity takes work.

There are essays that can be written about this, probably have been. And I may touch on it from time to time.

Cheers, Jeff

Inspiration Revisited

One thought that comes to mind - when I'm writing poetry, when I'm actually sitting at the computer with an idea that I'm trying to work through with a poem, I like to play solitaire or some mindless game. Just that little bit of distraction from focusing too hard on the piece I'm working on allows me to relax into the zone of creativity.

Doesn't ALWAYS work, but enough to keep me doing it.

Play and write - hey, sounds like a plan!!

Cheers,

Jeff

A Poetry Sample

Horses in the Mist

When just before the day breaks free
Rips loose the ragged reign of night
The clouds descend to hug the land
Obscure the image from my sight
Of pastures where the grass is kissed
With dew, graze horses in the mist

I pause to see their equine grace
In stately stance or joyous run
With wisps of gray they're cloaked until
A morning breeze reveals the sun
As tendrils of the fog persist
Subdue the horses in the mist

This poem is not in my book. It is in the poetry anthology Sailing in the Mist of Time which was compiled from the Margaret Reid Traditional Poetry Contest. I don't have any punctuation in it mostly because I am lazy about such things. I think I did include it in the version I submitted to the contest.

This style is a rather classical, traditional style of poetry. I write in many different styles. Though I lean more toward rhyme, every now and then I like to let a good freeverse rip! The *rip* really refers to my writing it - not necessarily its impact. :-)

The inspiration for this poem came when I drove by a pasture one misty morning where horses were grazing. First thought to come to mind was - 'horses in the mist', that would be a nice poem title. Then the whole thing started pouring out. I finished it at work that morning.