Guest Blogger Barry Napier talks Poetry

"Using Every Outlet"

Guest blogging is, by nature, sort of tricky.  It’s the equivalent of hiring a babysitter that you have just met and know nothing about.  And since Cynthia has been kind enough to allow me into her house, let me go ahead and introduce myself before I begin my rambling.

My name is Barry Napier and I write dark fiction.  I’ve had more than 30 short stories and poems published online and in print, most recently in The Pedestal Magazine, Kaleidotrope, Inkspill Magazine, and Night Terrors.  My short fiction collection, Debris, was released last year and my chapbook The Final Study of Cooper M. Reid was released in June of this year.  Next year will see the release of my first novel, The Bleeding Room, through the small horror press Graveside Tales.

Most recently, however, my poetry collection A Mouth for Picket Fences has gone up for pre-order from Belfire Press (official release date is September 28^th).  

The previous sentence is likely the hundredth time I’ve written that or a similar statement within the past month and it still sounds odd to me.  A poetry collection was the absolute last thing I thought I’d have published when I started really trying my hand at this writing thing.

Here’s the thing about poetry: I think anyone can do it as long as they can open up and be honest about their writing.  Here’s what I mean…

Even when I first started writing way back in high school, I was aware that my prose was far too wordy.  As I went to college and started taking writing more seriously, I thought I could use my wordiness to my advantage.  After all, I was a fan of Stephen King and he had released two books of over 1,000 pages that I considered classic.  Of course, it did not take me long to realize that I was not Stephen King and that unless you are a master of the craft, being overly descriptive and wordy can be a hindrance. 

As I really tried to get my foot in the door of the publishing world, I finally learned that I was going to have to work on my writing.  The first thing I did was learn to exorcise the wordiness from my fiction.  I would find myself getting over-descriptive when the scene didn’t call for it.  In the midst of otherwise bloody scenes, I somehow ended up waxing poetic about the way the moonlight made spilled blood look like “black dew, refused by the ground” (painfully, this was an actual line that was later edited) or how overhead fluorescent lights “danced like daredevil angels along the blade of the knife.”  (Again, not very good but hey, this was about four years ago).

The poetic side of me—which, coincidentally, I believe is the part of me that feared being labeled as nothing more than a horror writer—did not like removing lines like these.  I actually kept a notebook with these deleted lines and toyed around with placing them into lyrics for the incredibly underwhelming band I was in at the time.

In the end, it was these sorts of lines that helped me rediscover poetry.  I fell in love with Dickinson in high school and studied Elliot and Cummings pretty deeply in college.  And of course, as an aspiring writer of dark things, I liked Dante quite a lot as well.  I fell back into these names several years ago, trying to find a way to set myself into the mindset of a poet.  My education in poetry is limited; I took a few modules and a single semester in college and nothing more.

After a while, I got brave enough to submit a poem to an anthology titled Death in Common.  The editor, to my surprise, was very excited about my poem and I have remained friends with him ever since.  The editor of that anthology and the small grouping of small press horror writers that I associate myself with have been incredibly enthusiastic about my poetry.  This encouragement  morphed a hobby that I sort of kept bottled up into an exercise I put myself through almost daily now.

In any given month, I write about 12 poems.  Of those 12, only 5 or so end up making the cut.  If this were the case with my short fiction, I assure you I would have gone mad a long time ago.

All of that to say this: I strongly believe that if you have the capacity to write fiction, you have the capacity to write poetry.  And it is likely true the other way around.  The recent surge of popularity in flash fiction (and even Hint Fiction as well) is, I believe, proof of this.

I encourage every writer out there to attempt writing a poem sometime this week, even if you have never attempted it before.  Approach it with the same step in which you begin your journeys with fiction and hold nothing back.  Even if you’re known for writing visceral scenes of murder and gore, poetry allows the vulnerable side to come out.  And for you romantics, it is the perfect outlet for the rage you’ve kept bottled up under flowery prose.

Don’t limit yourself.  You are a writer, so write. 

If my little excursion into poetry has taught me anything, it’s that there is a plot to everything, even the densest of haiku. There’s no sense in letting formatting and structure hinder you.  As I said at the beginning of this lengthy post, I never even gave a passing thought to the idea that I would one day release a book of poetry.  And now I can’t image what my writing would be like if I did not have it as an outlet to use.

So I urge you to give it a try.  You might just surprise yourself.

Read more from Barry at his blog: www.barrynapierwriting.wordpress.com