::PROSAIC JUSTICE: OR, MUSINGS INSPIRED BY AN EMAIL::

When I find it difficult to describe something, I resort to poetry. It's somehow easier to string words together into feet and lines and stanzas than it is to engineer them into structured sentences. In my perfection-driven world, it's kind of cheating -- taking the easy way out. I'm often faced with images that spark around in my mind and are too ethereal to commit to real, full-on sentences (see the Fog Project and "And the Red Light" for examples). Poetry, I said to my correspondent, was like the fake orgasm of writing: "I've had enough with this, and I'm ready to have it over with."

Though the aptness of my metaphor was questionable, I kept going with it.

I do not have as much disdain for poetry as I have for "faking it" -- I will "resort" to poetry but never to the latter -- but building a great sentence out of the perfect words (or having one built for me) is a powerful experience. (Here's where the metaphor falls apart; taking in good poetry, to me, is as good -- maybe better than -- reading prose. Yet I continue, restricting the faking-it to the process of writing poetry, not to poetry itself.)

Then I thought about non-free -- restricted -- verse. Sonnets. Renga. Haiku. Are they the bondage-games poets play? Instead of the hard-to-finish-off lover that free verse entails, they are instructive and demanding lovers:

"Overlay the sound of that word with that one over there."

"Twist meaning just a bit -- yes, like that."

"Only seventeen."

Each has a discernable beginning and end -- a body onto which the words are kissed.

My next poetic effort will be with a worthy bedpartner. A clarity pyramid, maybe. Or a tectractys. Maybe I'm feeling a little curious and will check out a kyrielle. (It'll not be a limerick, that I assure you.)