David Hoppe

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:: Indianapolis is a sonnet

Creativity can work best with limits

By David Hoppe

In times like these, we begin, almost, to pity our politicians. How many times have you heard someone, remarking on the size of the job facing President Obama, say, or Mayor Ballard, let loose with an eye-rolling groan followed by: "I wouldn't wish that on a dog!" Or words to that effect.

Oddly enough, one doesn't hear such expressions very often about Gov. Daniels, though the challenges he faces dealing with the state of Indiana would seem plenty daunting. Maybe that's because he's done such a good job of blaming others for the fix we're in.

Nor does this take into account the Rush Limbaughs of the world, whose nests are feathered by feasting on the failings of others.

The majority of us are more generous than this. We want our leaders to succeed because we recognize that we're all in this together; that, to a great extent, our fortunes will likely rise or fall depending on the extent to which our politicians come up with creative solutions to the problems bedeviling us.

Take Mayor Ballard. He's got to figure out how to hammer the square peg of city services like public safety, the repair of streets and sidewalks, wastewater treatment, and mass transit into the shrinking hole of diminishing city revenues. Not only that, he's been saddled with some supposed assets, like a gargantuan football stadium, that have turned out to be more expensive than anticipated and that the city can't really afford.

Ouch.

And in the background, people are already muttering about how this, that, or the other will look when the rest of the country descends upon us in 2012 for the Super Bowl. What if there's a blizzard?

When money - or credit, anyway - was loose, local politicians found it easy to say yes to a lot of things. Some of those things, like a wastewater treatment project, were crucial to the city's overall quality of life. Others, like that football stadium, had more to do with making us feel good about ourselves, like Indianapolis was a contender among cities for whatever other people considered the Big Time.

In those days, if things didn't work out quite the way they were supposed to, that was ok. Papers got shuffled, debt got restructured, and we were off to the next great idea.

It felt good. Like that day you actually moved into a house you were never supposed to be able to afford.

Now the operative word for politicians like Mayor Ballard is "no." He's got to say no to keep the budget from getting completely out of hand, to keep taxes from exploding. But that's a problem, too. Saying no doesn't keep things from falling apart. It doesn't make sick people healthy. It doesn't make a neighborhood safer.

So Mayor Ballard needs to be creative. This means learning to work productively within certain limitations. Although the mayor was responsible for a large cut to the city's arts budget last year - a way of saying no that was a little too easy and not nearly productive enough in terms of the city's budget shortfall - he might turn to the arts to get a better grip on his decision making.

Any artist worth her salt knows about working with limitations. That's usually the name of the game. This may have to do with dealing with a lack of funds or space or time, but it is also embedded in the formal demands of the work itself.

Take, as just one example, the sonnet. A sonnet is a type of poem that enjoyed a kind of craze during the Renaissance. It's 14 lines long, usually set to a predetermined rhyme scheme. Shakespeare loved to write sonnets, but so have other poets who came later, including William Butler Yeats and Robert Frost.

The thing about the sonnet (or, for that matter, the haiku, the 17-syllable form practiced in these pages with such wit and invention by Jim Poyser) is that its form won't budge. The writer who tries to make her ideas and feelings sing within those 14 lines can't simply rely on inspiration. She must constantly say no so that what she really wants to say will fit.

Matching what is said to the form so that the sonnet itself seems, at once, to disappear and yet enhance the final product may be made up of countless no's. But, when the poem finally works, the result is a resounding yes.

When writing about cities, many poets have tended toward an epic format, hoping the sheer size of the undertaking might capture the scale of what they've tried to represent. But while the problems we face may seem epic at times, the creativity to deal with them needs to be acute.

Our mayor could do worse than to try his hand at writing sonnets.