Unfettering the brat

Ivy from Ivy is here says the following about form

The thing I find valuable about form (and I've found this in other fields of creativity, such as theatre and performance) is that there is a freedom in restriction. It forces you to be inventive. If you're not allowed to go beyond imposed limits, you have to be that much more imaginative within those limits.

And I really like that. I've come up with scenarios that to me are amazing and a surprise. If I'm surprised, then I bet the audience/reader is surprised, too. I know I would not have come up with this stuff, had I not had the walls I was given.

Form does allow you to be inventive by providing agreeable boundaries. Like permitting a child space to practice his/her anarchy within certain limits, at first your passions desire to run wild and chaotic, but over time a new sense of security allows imagination to find fresh and surprising means of conception.

But at some point the brat needs to run free. That’s where I find myself now. I think that’s one of the reasons I started this blog: not only to push myself into different directions but also to experience others who may have contradictory ideas about things. I may not agree at first, or at all, but it’s a breath of fresh air to inhale.

Still I’m having some difficulty. Each time I start writing a poem in free verse, I end up writing it in meter. I’m a creature of habit and I’m addicted to this one. It took me years to find myself there, a slow tortuous process of rhythm to accent and finally syllable, and now I can’t find the words out. So for now I’m writing essays that are next door to prose poems in a manner of speaking, hoping to free a rambunctious voice.

Yet it’s not a matter of wanting to experiment for experiment’s sake. I still think communication and rhythm are key, but something this way comes. Not wanting to go back in that fruitless direction of formalism versus the rest of the world, but I do sometimes feel that for many in that country, form comes first. Borders are advantageous things to have but sometimes one needs to travel outside them.