An Oblique Approach to Reality

Listening to an episode of “Writing Excuses,” I heard the phrase “poetry is an oblique approach to reality.”  I don’t remember who said it, nor who was being quoted, but the phrase itself struck me as one of those deceptively simple observations which have the power to recontextualize an entire framework.  In this case, the description of poetry as an oblique approach to reality allowed me to finally grasp why it that no matter how much I study poetic techniques and forms, I cannot seem to effectively write poetry.  I blame being an engineer.

Not in anything about the work I do, but in how my engineer’s brain functions.  I tend to think of things, and understand things, in a direct, logical fashion, moving through subconscious (or sometimes intentional) steps of syllogistic forms to reach a result.  This is reflected in my writing, which is usually sequential, with a clear and mostly linear chain of events from the beginning to the end.  One things leads to the next because of X, and that thing leads to another thing because of Y, and so forth.  Neat and orderly, sometimes to a fault, as it can lead me to make uninteresting plot decisions and present flat, mechanical characters.  If the language in my prose can be described as poetic, it is in the descriptions.  Through studying poetry, writing, language, and techniques, I’ve learned how to apply poetry to prose passages, but that is a fundamentally different skill from writing poems.

What I do is apply poetic tools towards a direct end.  Original poems, though, require this idea of approaching reality obliquely.  Rather than directly addressing a topic, poems take a less obvious path.  It’s tempting to say that the direct path is a straight line between two points, while the poetic path is more meandering, but that’s not quite true.  Rather, poetry addresses the same final point by approaching it from a different starting point.  The path may be longer or shorter, and we could probably construct an extended metaphor about how poems take a path to the final point which follows non-Euclidean geometry, but the key point is that the starting point is not where you expect it to be.

In that respect, it’s a little like the reverse of comedy.  I’ve studied humor, a bit, and one of the main techniques is the reversal or comic drop, in which you take advantage of contrast to create a humorous juxtaposition.  In other words, you start from a known point and end somewhere unexpected, whereas poems begin somewhere unexpected and reach a familiar point.

Thinking of poetry as an oblique approach to reality reframes my understanding of poems and helps explain why I’ve always struggled with writing original poems, but it doesn’t mean I can suddenly write poetry.  The more important takeaway from this whole idea is a realization of just how direct I can be in how I approach ideas, and how that may be a weakness in my writing, plotting, and characterization.  It will take practice to keep alternatives in mind, but I suspect that, in time, taking an oblique approach to reality will benefit more than my ability to originate poems.