Poetry, Short Stories, and Other Forms of Innovation

I will try to explain how I believe writing poetry or short stories is like creating a new product, developing the concept for a startup business or figuring out how to invest venture capital.

First, I will investigate the process of writing poetry, I will then do the same for short stories and finally, I will make the connection between these two processes and those things I just mentioned.

How does one write poetry? Writing high-quality poetry is different from writing low-quality poetry. Based, in part, on years of writing the latter with an occasional breakthrough into the former; in part on what I have learned from reading it and finally, on what those who really know the subject say; I will offer my opinion on the difference between high- and low-quality poetry.

First, high-quality poetry is complex. It may be simple in terms of the words used, rhyme or meter, metaphors, etc; but ultimately, it will have a level of complexity beneath its apparent simplicity, or it may be obviously complex. Here are examples of the type of complexity to which I refer, first subtle and then obvious.

Not Ideas About the Thing, But the Thing Itself

Wallace Stevens

At the earliest ending of winter,

In March, a scrawny cry from outside

Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,

A bird’s cry at daylight or before,

In the early March wind

The sun was rising at six,

No longer a battered panache above snow . . .

It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism

Of sleep’s faded papier mâché . . .

The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry—it was

A chorister whose c preceded the choir.

It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,

Still far away. It was like

A new knowledge of reality.

Infanta Marina

Wallace Stevens

Her terrace was the sand

And the palms and the twilight.

She made of the motions of her wrist

The grandiose gestures

Of her thought.

The rumpling of the plumes

Of this creature of the evening

Came to be sleights of sails

Over the sea.

And thus she roamed

In the roamings of her fan,

Partaking of the sea,

And of the evening,

As they flowed around

And uttered their subsiding sound.

Why is it necessary for good poetry to be complex? Because anything else is cliché,

trivial, without depth. We can all produce simple poetry, but it takes a master to write poetry containing true depth and lasting meaning.

Second, good poetry is beautiful in its design, form, structure. A poem may be beautiful because of its rhyme pattern, its meter, the combination; but mostly it is beautiful because all of its facets fit together sort of like the color and shapes of flowers fit.

Third, good poetry pays tribute to the poetry that came before but adds something too.

Something similar is true of short stories. They have complexity, beauty of form, fit into the stream within the genre; but they also include life characterization, internal coherence, and are distinctively crafted. Some writers are overtly clever and some are more subtly so; but all the good ones are clever in their own way.

Good poetry and short stories do not exist outside of other poetry and short stories; much as products, businesses and investments do not exist outside of a context.

Each new product, business or investment builds on the ones that came before, but adds something of value and in the best cases; something of great value. Sometimes what is added is within the existing frame and sometimes it is as if the new breaks the old frame; but nonetheless, there was a frame to break, to use as the starting point.

The best innovation will be complex, beautiful and build on past creativity. It will also tell a story in which deft characterization, internal coherence and distinct craft are evident.