Poetry is… well… whatever the Poet says it is.
If you know he or she is a stinky poet… hold your nose… and carefully read for anything worthy, and if you find nothing worth standing the smell of… then throw it in the trash before you let go of your nose so you never get a whiff of stinky poetry… that stuff can kill you.
If you know the poet is an average poet… hold your nose… just in case… and look to see if the ideas are crisp and fresh, bought in a farmer’s market rather than Walmart, and grown organically… not factory farmed. You should also check the quality of the protein versus the power of the carbohydrates… you don’t need too many calories in your poetry. Then let go of your nose… Why were you holding your nose anyway? Olfactory poetry is only for dogs and bad poets. Appreciate the nutrients in the verse, and ignore the effects of starvation that will set in if you never read any poetry above this level. The Rod McKuen and Joyce Kilmer level… well… if you only read this stuff, you deserve to poetically starve.
But then there is the Shakespeare-Sonnet level of poetry. No, get your hand away from your nose… this is not stinky-poet territory now. You are up in the stratosphere where if you get too close to the sun, you will get a Robert Browning, and if you swing too low over the Arctic, you may get a bit of Robert Frost. William Butler Yeats… Theodore Roethke… William Blake… John Keats… Emily Dickinson… they all will put wrinkles in your brain and silver streaks in your hair. You will find things you never thought about before… but wanted to know… needed to know… dared to know… but never before found anywhere else… because that’s what poetry is for… you read it… and understand a bit of the mind of God.
But finally, there is the unknown level of poetry. You go in with eyes wide open… not knowing if you will encounter the Goddess Aphrodite… or a monster… whether you will find love at first sight… or be hideously devoured by something wicked. This is where the horrible poetry of Mickey is most likely to abide (because unlike you, most people are wise enough not to read him,) and where the greatest poetry that Mickey has not yet read resides. Definitely enter here at your own risk.
So, that is the way Mickey recommends you read poetry. Aware that you may encounter rapturous particles of the heavenly ether, or die a death by dreadful doggerel verse.
Ah, irony again! It ends up being anything but simple. You can write in simple, adjective-and-adverb-free sentences as Hemingway did, and still manage to convey deeply complicated and thoughtful ideas. One might even suggest that you can create poetic ideas in mere prose, dripping with layers of emotion, conflict, theme, and deeper implied meaning. You can also write prose in the intensely descriptive and convoluted style of a Charles Dickens with many complex sentences and pages-long paragraphs of detail, using comic juxtapositions of things, artfully revealing character development, and idiosyncratic dialogue all for comedic effect. Prose is a powerful and infinitely variable tool for creating meaning in words. Even when it is in the form of Mickian purple paisley prose that employs extra-wiggly sentence structure, pretzel-twisted ideas, and hyperbolically big words.
The Way Mickey’s Mind Works
If you’ve read any of the crap that Mickey wrote about before in this goofy blog, you probably already suspect that Mickey’s mind does not work like a normal mind. The road map above is just one indicator of the weirdness of the wiring that propels Mickey on the yellow brick road to Oz and back. He just isn’t a normal thinker.
But having a few bats in the old belfry doesn’t prevent the man from having a plan. If you read all of Mickey’s hometown novels, you will discover he hasn’t written them in time order. Main characters in my 2016 novel weren’t even born yet in my 2017 books. If you look at them in chronological order rather than the order written, you will see characters growing and changing over time. A shy kid in one novel grows into a werewolf hunter in the next. A girl who loses her father to suicide in a novel not yet completed, learns how to love again in another novel.
Multiple Mickian stories are totally infected with fairies. The magic little buggers are harder to get rid of than mosquitoes and are far and away more dangerous. And there are disturbing levels of science-fiction-ness radiating through all of the stories. How dare he think like that? In undulating spirals instead of straight lines! He doesn’t even use complete sentences all the time. And they used to let that odd bird teach English to middle school kids.
But there is a method to his utter madness. He started with the simpler stories of growing up and learning about the terrors of kissing girls when you are only twelve. And then he moved on into the darker realms of dealing with death and loss of love, the tragedy of finding true love and losing it again almost as soon as you recognize its reality. Simple moves on to complex. Order is restored with imagination, only to be broken down again and then restored yet again,.
And, of course, we always listen to Mr. Gaiman. He is a powerful wizard after all. The Sandman and creator of good dreams. So Mickey will completely ignore the fact that nobody reads his books no matter what he does or says. And he will write another story.
It is called Sing Sad Songs, and it is the most complex and difficult story that Mickey has ever written. And it will be glorious. It also rips Mickey’s heart out. And I will put that ripped-out heart back in place and make Mickey keep writing it, no matter how many times I have to wash, rinse, and repeat. The continued work is called Fools and Their Toys. It solves the murder mystery begun in Sing Sad Songs. This re-post of an updated statement of goals is the very spell that will made that magic happen. So, weird little head-map in hand, here we go on the writer’s journey once again and further along the trail.
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