Hello Friends,

For Meet the Bar we sometimes work with new forms, at other times we work with one specific method or tool that we can use to make our writing better and more interesting.

Today I would like us to use negation in poetry.a topic we last did back in 2018,

Via Negativa, a term which originally comes from Apophatic Theology and says that the divine can only be approached in terms of saying what a perfect God is not, letting the divine be the void in the middle.

Expanding this to anything abstract or emotional you can define it with everything that it’s not. It can often be combined with examples of what it is.

You may think of the negation as crossroads with no-entry signs which leaves you with only one path to travel. The destination is given without really describing it.

Consider for instance the first quartet of Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet 17:

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul….

To me, this moves the love of someone from something cliché like, a rose or a gem, to something earthly and real. I find it often very powerful denying the cliché.

Negations can be subtle and layered into the poem as in The Tyre by Simon Armitage 

… not curled like a cat in the graveyard, not
cornered in the playground like a reptile,
or found and kept like a giant fossil…. 

It can start the poem like in Pablo Neruda’s poem above, or end it like in e.e. cumming’s somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond:

…nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

I have tried to work this into my own poetry from time to time, for instance last week in my poem on margins forever if not where I used negation as a repetitive element.

As you can see from my examples, negation is most powerful when you develop metaphors. It is a great way to avoid (ur use) cliches, and remember that looking at everything that it’s not can be a good way to write positively.

When you have written your own poem please link up below and remember to visit and comment on the other entries as usual. Spread the word to your friends and have fun in the company of ours.