On Poetry · 4:35am Feb 3rd, 2015
My how time flies. I did have some small training in the mechanics of poetry in college. I had about a semester in literature (and that is a very small amount) which was about 40 years ago (and that is a bit of time). So I am by no means familiar with the metrics and rhyming systems employed by the poets. I considered this at length for the past few days trying to get my thoughts in order on the subject. What I came to was this: While it can greatly help ones appreciation of the subject to understand systems of poetry it is not a requirement any more than knowing that water flows from low ion concentration to high ion concentration across a semi-permeable membrane is a requirement for me to know that when I put too much salt on a steak it becomes dry. And this is as it should be.
The Heavens know that poets want people to enjoy their poetry, regardless of the level of critical fame and academic critique it accumulates. Poetry is meant to make you think, like any piece of prose or technical writing is meant to make you think. But it is unique in trying to tap deepest into your primal senses with rhythm, rhyme, song, imagery and emotion. It attempts to cause you to feel something so that you will think strongly about things, so that your emotions will infuse your thinking with pathways which will remain clear, long after the thought is gone. That is my hope at least when I write poetry. I recently wrote a short piece entitled "On the Outside Looking In." I was asked what it meant. I knew what it meant for me of course. But beyond that I was only hoping for it to mean SOMETHING to the listener, to cause them to think strongly about SOMETHING. As I read once in an old Zen Koan:
"The whole of life is not to do something profound
Or to think something profound but
To feel something profound so that in so feeling you will
Think with clarity and in so thinking
will simply do."
Poetry must be more beautiful than life itself. Prose can bring us the science of life, the mechanics of it with great precision, but poetry must by its nature over-emphasize certain aspects, bring to the reader a focus which they hitherto lacked. I am not discounting that poetry and prose often overlap, indeed I praise this as using the tools of both most broadly, to expand their use.
My father was a jazz guitarist. It was the music played in my home for most of my childhood. In jazz pieces the musician is often encouraged to take the basic melody and chord structure and just run with it, maintaining fealty to the basic structure of course (drummers especially sometimes take liberties even with this) for several bars, sometimes passing this off to the next soloist, and sometimes returning control to the orchestra at large and the original melody. This process gives both the performer and the listener the permission to let their mind soar within the piece without losing its most essential nature. The person who wrote the piece did not write in the solo, the performer improvised it. In actuality the performer saw in it, in a sense, more than the writer did. That is the way of all performers, we readers included.
That is why I like T. S. Eliot so much. There are bits of his work which have obvious meter and rhyme, those I like to adhere to as best I can. And there are less obvious rhyming schemes that I attempt to understand. But there are other places where I see things in the words that appeal to me, places I want to go where the author might not have originally intended. Things that speak specifically to ME. And I read those as I want, poetry police be damned. The poet wants his work to be read, to be discussed, to be enjoyed. Beyond that all bets are off. I can tell you what he DOESN'T want. And that is for someone to put words into his mouth and say "This was not what the poet meant at all. This was not it at all" when that was exactly what he meant, or saying what he meant when it wasn't.
Read my poetry, yes, flatter me with that and say all manner of things it means to you, the more the merrier; you are thinking then, see? The poem is moving you. Just, when you wish to say what the poem means to the author, ask him. You are by no means obligated to feel the same way. That being said, please listen to Melt or read it here. Also listen to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" or read it.
You're exaggerating, right?
. . . Right?
Anyway, I pretty much agree with you, though I wish I could connect more with poetry. I am more of a prose writer and reader, and I take pride in that. At a time, I thought I could write a line of poetry, maybe a stanza or two, but that will has long since degraded and flew away like dust in the wind. Poetry can be immensely beautiful, something admirable and commendable, but I think that school has made the reading experience awfully dull and droll, the main reason being that (at least at my school) they drill the material into you and then move right on along their happy, merry way.
Either way, poetry is an interesting little thing.
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Oh that I were exaggerating. I do not mind the age, it actually confers a lot of benefits if one gathers them in and manages to remain reasonably healthy. It is just that right about the time you start to figure out the puzzle, it is nearly completed. I write poetry because I tend to be reductive, I like to distill, I constantly think in metaphor and pun. I admire YOU guys who can write engaging well paced satisfying stories. That takes a LOT of work to do well and my mind just isn't right for it. I am a tinker, not a world builder. But my hat is off to you for doing it and I thank you for it.
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You've created a monster. I've gone paragraph mad!
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I've never thought of making paragraphs as fun, mainly since it's an automatic thing for me, but it is no doubt ridiculously valuable. It makes you better organize yourself, among other things.
I think "poetry" is a misleading word. We put it up against "prose" or "fiction", and expect it to be the same sort of category. But "poetry" may be everything left over in the vast space of all possible things you can do with words once you subtract the more well-defined, tightly-clustered, rule-bound set of "prose". It's hard enough to say what fiction "is" or "means"; "poetry" has such a broad scope that I don't think we should even talk about it that way, as if it were a natural category.