The process for writing poetry as a transgenic author means focusing on the speculative, creating new links between the components of reality and building up an alternate plane from the resulting fictional web. Basically, you’ll be picking what that dead and beaten donkey of postmodernism has left after its deconstruction and constructing back from it, this time not describing the new systematization of reality as an absolute —remember that was what lead to the rejection of modernism—, but reckoning the posibility of your proposed system as an alternative among many. Its target isn’t the emanating system itself, but the contrast you produce through creative writing between your transgenic vision and the actual reality.
So, taking this as a background, the basic starting tips for writing poetry the transgenic way could be:
- Use metaphora by their contrast value against reality, not just as a semantic evasion or mystification.
- Unlike in postmodernism, systematic metrics and rhyme are ok for transgenic poetry, but you must give that choice its own meaning. You can either create your own or use the classic with unusual themes to power up your contrasts.
- Internal realism is important for the credibility of your alternative view. That means, that the construction itself, if it was taken isolated form any knowledge, would transmit the sense of the real. The reader knows the reference —the propositions—, are artifacts, probably even pure fantasy, but more importantly they are coherent with the internal reality of your work.
- Transgenism is a style of choices. You can freely borrow from other sources, movements, styles, whatever, as long as they are organically integrated into a self-natural equilibrium. As in life, a transgenic plant is still a plant, and a transgenic reality is still a reality.
- Moral and didactism aren’t as bad as postmodernism made them look. They are a logic consequence of putting things under a contrasting light, so if you want to write about global warming, religion or real estate prices, do it. But never forget that your vision is one among infinite variants, and so you should provide it to the reader as a suggestion, as food for thought, not as an epic dogma.
- Anecdote as a theme is all right, but even anecdotic life events are organically connected into a system, one or another. Your anecdote can be the transgenic gene itself, or it can be altered by your deliberate modification of the reality that surrounds it.
- While in the current postmodernism emotions are somewhat deafened to stay away of drama and epic, in transgenism they are just another piece of the construction. Even the essentially emotional poems wouldn’t fall beyond transgenism as long as the source of those emotions doesn’t have its cause in an actual reality (past, present or probably future), but in a purposeful twist of it.
- There’s no written rule about if transgenism must be optimistic or pessimistic. The optimistic way leads to the utopic genre, the pessimistic way to dystopia. Plain ucronic pasts, presents or futures can be quite neutral, it’s probably a matter of what you contrast your themes against.
Now, you’ll need to excuse me for not adding here some examples of transgenic poetry. I’m a prose guy, and when I started all this fuss about transgenism was after three years of looking how it would apply to narrative. But since I enjoy a lot reading poetry, I thought it would be worth to resume some tips including metrics and poetic language. If you are giving it a try, drop me a link! I’ll be happy to read and comment it.
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Image credit: Marjori A. Matzke, Antonius J. M. Matzke; credit Jan Kooter for the left and middle images, and Natalie Doetsch and Rich Jorgensen for the right images. - License: Creative Commons Attribution - Source: Wikimedia.
