Austerity and maximalism

This is the third in a short run of postmortem devlogs following the release of CWKB. I offer these in case they're useful!

I think the formal choices in Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright show two instincts that pull against each other.

Austerity

Blank verse doesn’t restrict writing very much, and I find constraints promote thought. I therefore chose to write almost universally in lines ending on a beat, not an extrametrical offbeat (a so-called 'masculine' metrical ending). This made the rhymes in the two books written mosty in rhyme royal quite challenging! I also restricted beat inversion to the first beat only. 

Different poets write five-beat lines differently: Chaucer, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thom Gunn all wrote poetry in five-beat rising lines, but each has a specific metrical fingerprint. I fall towards the constrained/restrained end of the spectrum, which means the mainstay verse in CWKB takes on a certain extra legibility—good when many in the audience read little poetry—but also risks monotony. Whether this paid off is in part a question of taste, though I’ll note that John Gower used similar metrical restrained in less space in the four-beat lines of Confessio Amantis, and it worked for him. But then I’m no Gower.

Greater constraint crops up in the rhyme royal stanzas, and of course in all the alliterative verse passages. Some (but not all) of the alliterative verse stays pickier than actual Old and Middle English poets were about the exact matching of some consonant clusters.

Maximalism

But CWKB pursues maximalist instincts in some ways, too. Generally if I felt the need to say something, I let myself go on about it. If a chance arose to talk about giant robots battling each other, I took that chance. And moments of restraint come rarely: it is a tub-thumping poem, a bombastic poem.

In part, this bombast stems from lack of skill: subtlety is hard, and I am gauche. To the extent that that's true, CWKB is probably cringe, or would probably feel cringe to any critic or poet from the world of present-day art poetry, if any of them ever stumbled across it.

In part, also, the bombast forms a knowing aesthetic choice. Pulling out the stops on the organ helps make lines that normal people, who don't read poetry, enjoy. And as described above I wanted to write a poem that normal people might find fun.

I think, too, that maximalism impresses me in some works I admire across several different mediums. Perhaps none of the tyro's fireworks in CWKB ever achieve the swelling effect found in watching the best moments of Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still. But if any ever do, I'll have achieved one goal.

Previous postmortem entries:

• You can just write what you want
• Starting at the start