Poetry - The Choir in My Head
I started out, as I suppose a great many authors do, writing poetry. It seemed the sensitive, artistic thing to do - and it was a hell of a lot easier and quicker for me than crafting a short story, or the dreaded (at the time) task of writing an entire novel. The thing is, I love poetry. I have always loved poetry. When I read The Lord of the Rings, the things I remembered were lines like
“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can.
Pursuing it with weary feet
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then?
The Road goes ever on and on
And whither then?
I cannot say.”
I was haunted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his vision of Xanadu. Some of you will recall that I made an attempt to exorcise that particular demon in my story “The Milk of Paradise,” but I’m not sure I succeeded. I love Coleridge’s image-drenched verse, and Poe’s rhythmic, mesmerizing ballads, and the Bard’s unbelievable economy of words in crafting huge meaning into short sonnets. I love the Japanese art of Haiku - so much can be said with so few words.
Over time, I came to realize that my initial reaction was absolutely false. While shorter, poetry is much harder to write well than a short story, and a short story is harder to write well than a novel. You have only so much clay - you have to make something striking with what you are allotted. Poetry gives you the least and demands the most.
Over the years I’ve written a lot of poetry. Most of the defining moments of my life can be charted in verse. Everyone I have loved, everyone that has hurt me, or that I have hurt, every dream realized, lost, and forgotten, has been chiseled into a journal, or onto a computer, or onto a napkin in a bar at some point. A lot of it is lost…and that saddens me a bit.
At one point, the Horror Writer’s Association awarded me the Bram Stoker Award for poetry. It was an odd moment, to be sure. For one thing, while I consider poetry very serious art, I find most genre poetry to be rife with affectation and without much depth. I lobbied against the inclusion of the poetry category in those very awards because I don’t feel that there is a niche for professional “horror” poetry. Poetry is what it is. Some is dark, some is not, but I draw the line at carving it into genres like they’ve done to books and stories. Verse and song remain two forms that can be taken where other written arts fear to tread, and it should always be that way.
Hopefully I’ll have a couple of new poems upcoming - I will let you know how that goes. For now, I wanted to get these thoughts onto the screen, and to mention that I’ve added a page link at the side. It’s a link for Poetry. All you will find there is a set of links to some of my previously published verse…and some that are just important to me.
The Newly Launched David Niall Wilson Poetry Archive
Enjoy…
-DNW
