Enigma

Beyond Acrostics

In 1997, I fell in love with my neighbor and wrote poetry for her but felt dissatisfied with the verses as nothing seemed to convey my feeling with enough power. Dissatisfaction led to more writing physically layered with meaning to achieve uniqueness. Ironically, the writing would go unnoticed because the girl disliked reading but the effort produced Enigma, the first book I wrote of later classified multidimensional poetry.

Multidimensional writing forms a love and deep-rooted scorn, starting in 1997 when several academics negatively reacted to the work. I never tried to publish the book, and for a decade, I made feeble efforts to refine the material. In truth, the book was not horrific, and I allowed the opinion of a few people to derail my goal. In 2018, I returned to Enigma and decided to publish the poetry in a short book categorized as multidimensional poetry because of the writing’s nature.

I define multidimensional poetry as a minimum of two poems interlaced to form a diverse subject perspective. Multidimensional poetry is not acrostic or anagrammatic, although these elements appear often. Rather two or more complete poems construct a single poem. The inner poem (the one most embedded) holds the core idea while the outer poems explore themes or perspectives. The poetry is not linear because the poems align recursively, supporting the central concept. Much flexibility exists in the poetry layering, and the core concept could funnel in or out, among other forms, which ultimately, I believed provided more perspective, such as showing dissonance, conflict, or plot elements.

Dawn ascends, withering night
Awestruck and stressing to write
Words scribe of their own accord
Not without ailing discord.

This reveals as,

Dawn ascends, withering night
Awestruck and stressing to write
Words scribe of their own accord
Not without ailing discord.

These anagrams gave way to the first multidimensional poem:

Ciphers I. (Excerpt)

Take these hands; they’re waiting for you
These fingers struggle for verse that’s true
Lines scribing affection’s war for you
They are the hands of the fighting man
Are they battered and beaten enough?
More built for war than poetic fluff
Yours is the love inciting the greater war
Than any of love’s causes waged before
Mine is the fight for rhyme perfection...

You can seen the inner poem easier this way,

Take these lines; they are more yours than mine...

In later years, several formatting problems appeared when using reflowable digital formats in ebooks: a problem for all poetry. I would not encounter these until 2018 because I originally wrote the book in cursive then typed it on a word processor. (One of the last things I hand wrote.)

The typed manuscript presented the first major hurdle when a friend criticized the work as having no purpose since you can't see the messages. This criticism launched me into formatting the work (as I did above) to make the messages visible, which drew more criticism for stealing the discovery process. Sadly, the issue became even more problematic when trying to show the dimensions of text using formatting in eBooks.

This is the tying and untying of our cipher
Is not the song of love the same song of the Piper?⁴
For have I not followed your love song in blind musing?
You dropped a wild note in lyrics of verse enticing
I sought your poetry’s truth and rhyme across my life
Created in me a relentless poetic strife
This turmoil erupts, blazes, and rages to escape
Art of poetics inflicts this soul obsession’s rape

Is not love’s quest to prove what the heart knows to be true?
This heart beats, trembles, and cries, praying the truth’s in you
Not a paragraph, sentence, or word could I relate
The derivative thoughts from poets both present and late
Way of the Poet –– the love that poets learn to hate

The mundane words of the philosophers and teachers,
Way of the spiritualists, way of the preachers
Of all the romantics who so ardently professed,
“My heart is true,” and believed and swore and so confessed,
“Soul of Love is a fleeting spirit of emotion,
“The way of love is found when seeking non-devotion
“Way to Love is supreme, soul-fulfilling symmetry,
“To find your one true, perfect love look for harmony
“Your perfect mate does eternally for you await
“Heart of the Lord your God is the only heart to sate”

Way of other men’s tired poetries are not for me... (Excerpt)

Reading the first word of each line forms a poem, and then you would read the underlined word that starts each stanza to know the inner most poem. The formatting made publication difficult, which felt like a losing battle since no one appreciated or saw the inner poetry, but this was not the worst problem.

I want to go on the record as saying, "I blame Whitman." That bastard's influence caused me to write in free verse too long.

All joking aside, my fascination with free verse kept me from developing metered poetry, which made multidimensional writing a chaotic jumble without a pattern or rhyme scheme. Above is my attempt to meter the poetry, which I believe failed because creating a true meter would require rewriting inner and outer poems. When I attempted the correction, I began destroying the poetry's meaning and stopped. The fragment above highlights the lack of meter, but in the book, uneven stanzas and inconsistent rhyme scheme glare at the reader.

I shelved the project for a long time, unable to solve many problems, and returning decades later, I tried to make coherency corrections but will make no further content changes. This project taught me that free verse might have too much freedom, limiting the expression's artistry. Multidimensional poetry came from my struggle to distill human experiences, beliefs, and emotions into a few lines of poetry or prose, but a connected train of ideas seems to require some pattern or structure. I remain unsure; hopefully, you will decide.

Final Edition available in Digital & Print

Enigma is a small book, and formatting and printing complications make the print version expensive for some readers.