Rules Revisited: Beware the Brussels Sprouts

I don't mean to beat a dead horse here...or a horse statue...or even a wooden hobby horse.

Violence is wrong. 

Watching a three-day Green Acres/Petticoat Junction/Beverly Hillbillies marathon is wrong.

Cooking Brussels sprouts for anything other than insect fumigation is wrong.

Giving books for Christmas is good. Receiving books for Christmas is even better.

Yesterday, while I griped and grumbled about the notion of putting Brussels sprouts on the same menu as cherry pie and stuffed baked potatoes, the family placated my indignation by passing out gifts. (They're so smart.)

I loved all the presents, but one was especially appropriate to The Write Wind. 

A book. 

But not just any book. 

The 20th Century in Poetry, edited by Michael Hulse and Simon Rae. (Nothing like having an author in the family who feeds your literature addiction.) That in itself is a good thing. 

But what elevated the book immediately in my estimation was a "throw-away" sentence found in the introduction that reinforced the rantings of the Crabby Curmudgeon here a few weeks ago. 

CC said at the end of his tirade: "Learn the rules. Rigorously and repeatedly use them until they’re second nature. Then wreck ‘em! Stomp the heck out ‘em and develop your own. It’s fun."

In response, some readers/viewers saw that paragraph as the blasphemous raving of an old man, while others exhaled in welcome relief that finally the grammar Nazi of their adolescence had joined the real world. 

In actuality, it was the blasphemous raving of an old man, but be that as it may, Hulse and Rae's introduction confirmed CC's assessment of creative writing, at least in the realm of poetry. 

And CC was ecstatic about the affirmation. To the point of nearly letting the Brussels sprouts circle the table without comment.

Nearly. But he's old and can be forgiven.

"Back to the book," you say. 

Sorry. To make a short story long...

According to Hulse and Rae, as well as countless literary critics, the 20th Century was a battlefield of critical theory that pitted poets against readers against academics. The likes of Kipling against Yeats against Frost against Eliot against Ginsberg against Plath... Each spokesman claimed the correct theory, while viewing the collective hordes railing against them as heretics and charlatans.

Throughout the century, there were more theories of composition and analysis than there were alternatives to serving brussels sprouts for Christmas dinner. No wonder Hulse and Rae wrote: "The one rule in poetry is that there are no rules."

See why CC was so happy?

While that observation may seem permissive and lazy, the words are, in fact, liberating for poets and readers alike, especially when adopted by writers and audiences of the 21st Century. 

How?

Without the strictures of confining and arbitrary rules, the poet is free to say what he/she wants in the way that he/she wants to say it, creating a style most effective for the poem's purpose. 

The reader, freed from Pharisaical conventions of what makes good poetry, can step out of the putrid Puritanical temples of tradition and enter ever-expanding fields of fresh verse where poems are scrubbed clean of rancid rhythm and rhyme, purged of muddying metaphors, and shaped into masterpieces so deceptive in their simplicity that their beauty overwhelms the most intricate flowers.

On this day after the Christmas holiday, I am devouring this book of verse with the enthusiasm that my family ate the Brussels sprouts yesterday. 

I think I'm getting the better meal/deal. 

With fresh material to read and inspiration for new things to write, it's going to be a great new year. May yours be the same.