Feeling limited

[Caffeinated]

Every time I get started with writing of any kind, I start feeling that art is too limited somehow. That's probably the last word most people think of when they think about art, haha.

The harder I worked on the latest atrocity I call a poem, the more that the English language seemed so incredibly limited. I feel constrained by not only the small number of good poems that can possibly be written, but by the number of those poems that already have been done, too. Ugh.

Well, thoughts?

[k2hsharpe]

30 odd year ago something happened to me and immediately 2 poems were born into my mind. But neither of them ever adequately expressed what happened to me. Every so often over the years I would dust them off and try to make them convey the depth, the richness of my experience. Last year I gave up, declared them officially Inadequate but Finished. You can only flog a dead poem for so long
(laughing)))
Much of everything else I've written has been done in response to a specific experience and has written itself in perhaps 10 - 15 minutes. I may then spend several weeks putting in a comma, taking out a comma etc until I think the words have the maximum clarity I can offer. These I declare officially Adequate and Finished.
But in the end, probably only I will ever notice. Or care.

I suspect that those times your poems write themselves you'll find English perfectly adequate but the times you choose to write then English will seem less so?

[smorzando]

I hate it when that happens... you'll go to write, and then you just think that it's crap. And no matter what you do, it still seems crap; there are no words to really express whatever it is. That happens to me sometimes.. and you know what I do? I keep writing it anyway, even if I think it's absolute garbage, and then I leave it, and then post it or show it to someone, and half the time it's not as bad and restrictive as I thought it was.

smorz.

[Yog]

Language is inherintly limited. In normal speech language is quite limited, but when it comes to grand schemes and designs it often falls woefully short. It's just part of what we do, what we try and cope with when we write. It is the challenge, the joy, the wonder of good poetry that seeimingly inadequate words somehow meet with the wonder of what they describe.