Anyone doing poetry, I suggest you read
How Poetry Works by Phil Roberts. It doesn't exactly tell you how to write, but it shows all the features(?) of poetry... Yeah... Like metre, sound patterns (there are many more than rhyme), etc... Have a look anyway, it's really helped me.
I'm probably just going to do some observations of the modern world or something, I don't know really. Aslong as they're good, I don't care much about the concept and all that... I'll make it up at the end.
Perhaps something to do with Nietzsche and Goethe... there's a certain paragraph in
The Birth of Tragedy that's golden. I'll quote it actually. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do with this concept though... Gah, I hate all this uncertainty.
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While the transport of the Dionysian state, with its suspension of all the ordinary barriers of existence, lasts, it carries with it a
lethargical element in which everything that has been experienced by the individual is drowned. This chasm of oblivion separates the quotidian reality from the Dionysian. But as soon as that quotidian reality enters consciousness once more it is viewed with loathing, and the consequence is an ascetic, abulic state of mind. In this sense Dionysian man might be said to resemble Hamlet: both have looked deeply into the true nature of things, they have
gained knowledge and are now loath to act. They realize that no action of theirs can work any change in the eternal condition of things, and they regard the imputation as ludicrous or debasing that they should set right the time which is out of joint. Knowledge kills action, for in order to act we require the veil of illusion—such is Hamlet's doctrine, not to be confounded with the cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer, who through too much reflection, as it were a surplus of possibilities, never arrives at action!— What, both in the case of Hamlet and of Dionysian man, overbalances any motive leading to action, is not reflection but knowledge, the apprehension of truth and its terror. Now no comfort any longer avails, desire reaches beyond the transcendental world, beyond the gods themselves, and existence, together with its glittering reflection in the gods and an immortal Beyond, is denied. The truth once seen, man is aware everywhere of the ghastly absurdity of existence, comprehends the symbolism of Ophelia's fate and the wisdom of the wood sprite Silenus: nausea invades him.
Then, in this supreme jeopardy of the will,
art, that sorceress expert in healing, approaches him; only she can turn his fits of nausea into imaginations with which it is possible to live. These are on the one hand the
sublime, which subjugates terror by means of art; on the other hand the
comic, which releases us, through art, from the tedium of absurdity. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb was the salvation of Greek art; the threatening paroxysms I have mentioned were contained by the intermediary of those Dionysian attendants.
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If anyone's interested, I stole it from the Nietzsche Channel, a site with all his works...
http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/
