# Poetry. My WHOLE opinion



## Furthlingam (Jun 25, 2008)

Yeah, so, I've been writing this today in an effort to shore up my private ideas about poetry against the wacky opinions of authorities, as I'm thinking I need to read more what poets and self-proclaimed experts say about the artform.

This is kinda like, a big heap of opinionated bullshit. Some of it's right, though, and may be useful to people trying to decide if they want to write or read poetry.

So it's a kind of draft of a FAQ on poetry, or something like that. Criticism welcome.

POETRY
1. Intro
2. Why?
3. What poetry is not.
4. Repetition (Lines, Rhyme, Meter)
5. Evocation (Description, Feeling)
6. Vision (Experience, Imagination: having something to say)
7. Poetry is Theatre.

INTRO
In this essay, I'll be explaining what poetry is (and isn't).

WHY?
Understanding poetry will not make you a brilliant poet, nor will it make every poem utterly delicious. HOWEVER. As a rule, understanding poetry will help you write better poetry, and enjoy reading it more as well. Understanding something can make you more comfortable with it.



WHAT POETRY IS NOT:

Poetry is not something you have to like. Not everybody likes art or music, either.
Poetry is not difficult to understand. You do not have to be an egghead to get poetry or have a valid opinion of it. (A basic understanding of it helps, though.)
Poetry is not all equally good. You will like some poems better than others, and there's definitely lousy poetry.
Poetry is not something you should pretend to like. Why would you? It's easy to know what you like. Even if you can't write great poetry yourself, you're entitled to dislike a poem. Either you like it or you don't!
Poetry is not an excuse to get attention from people by cataloguing your current emotions.
Poetry is not therapy. There may be people to whom poetry comes very naturally, and they may write good poetry even while distraught. If you're still trying to collect yourself after a disappointment, talk to a friend, don't write poetry.
Poetry is not literature. It is not meant to simply be absorbed for it's message. That's why poetry can't be summarized or easily translated. YOU MUST either read poetry aloud, or at least hear it in your head being read aloud, in order to get it.
REPETITION
The first of the three key elements that make poetry is repetition, in various forms. Repetition in English verse comes in three major forms: repeated lines and words, repeated sounds or "rhyme," and repeated rythms or "meter."

REPEATED WORDS/LINES:
On the highest level, some kinds of poems repeat whole lines of text or whole words, many times. This often has an interesting effect, and emphasizes whatever's repeated. For example, one fairly obscure poetic form is the "pantoum." Note the repetition of whole lines:

"If we're so much the same like I always hear
Why such different fortunes and fates?
Some of us live in a cloud of fear
Some live behind iron gates

"Why such different fortunes and fates?
Some are blessed and some are cursed
Some live behind iron gates
While others only see the worst

"Some are blessed and some are cursed
The golden one or scarred from birth
While others only see the worst
Such a lot of pain on the earth"
--Rush (The Band), The Larger Bowl

RHYME
The most familiar trait of poetry, though not quite all poems use it, is the "rhyme," or sounds in words that are repeated in different words. Such as "Jolly, holly, Molly." or "Dog, frog, bog."

Rhyme is often used at the ends of "lines," the discrete sections of a poem, in various patterns. Line-ending poetry can follow a simple couplet pattern, e.g., AABBCCDD, or more complex variants, such as ABABCDCD, or anything else. Sometimes only every other line of a poem is rhymed. Other forms may have other rhyme schemes, such as the Limerick, which has the form AABBA:

"There was a Young Lady whose eyes,
Were unique as to colour and size;
When she opened them wide,
People all turned aside,
And started away in surprise."
-Edward Lear

Rhyming is perhaps the most inherently playful part of poetry. Even children can readily do it, and may do it just for fun. On the other hand, finding good rhymes in the usual course of writing poetry can be difficult; a decent rhyming dictionary can be indispensible even for someone with a masterful vocabulary and sharp wit.

Poetry that doesn't use rhyming is referred to as blank verse.


METER
In English, words can all be segmented up into syllables. For example, the word "poetry" has three syllables, roughly po, eh, and tree. Furthermore, words usually have both accented and unaccented syllables. Poetry's first syllable, po, is accented. The following two are not accented.

Given any patten of accented and unaccented syllables, that pattern could be repeated many times over, in text arranged to create the repetition. As a practical matter, the poetic ear only has the patience to notice patterns that are two or three syllables in length. So with an accent at either the start or the finish of these syllables, there are four basic metrical patterns or "metrical feet" as they are called, in English Verse (verse refers to poetry in the sense only of having meter):

Greek Name Pattern Word Examples
The Iamb: da-DA... "about," "before," "again," "between," "began," etc.
The Trochee: DA-da... "number," "over," "people," "water," "after," etc.
The Dactyl: DA-da-da... "usual," "numeral," "exercise," "instrument," etc.
The Anapest: da-da-DA... "indiscreet," etc.

Note that metrical feet need not be distinct words. Metrical feet can and usually do cross into different words, and vice versa.

Each line or segment of poetry then consists of a fixed number of repetitions of the metrical foot being used. The number of times a foot is used in a line of poetry also has a greek name:

Monameter: x1
Dimeter: x2
Trimeter: x3
Tetrameter: x4
Pentameter: x5
Hexameter: x6
Heptameter: x7
Octameter: x8

Free verse refers to poetry with no discernable meter-- usually it has no rhyme either.

EXAMPLES:

(Trochaic Tetrameter)
_Once upon a midnight dreary, _
_while I pondered weak and weary,_
_Over many a quaint and curious _
_volume of forgotten lore..._
--from The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
(Note, this is not perfect trochees througout. In the third line, "many a" is supposed to be a trochee, but is really a dactyl!)

(Dactylic Tetrameter)
_Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with_
_Tangerine trees and marmalade skies_
_Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly,_
_A girl with kaleidoscope eyes._
--from Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, The Beatles
(This is not perfect dactylic tetrameter-- "trees and" is a trochee being substituted for a dactyl, and the fourth line only has three dactyls, not four.)

(Anapestic Tetrameter)
_At the far end of town where the Grickle-grass grows_
_and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows_
_and no birds ever sing excepting old crows..._
_is the Street of the Lifted Lorax._
_And deep in the Grickle-grass, some people say,_
_if you look deep enough you can still see, today,_
_where the Lorax once stood just as long as it could_
_before somebody lifted the Lorax away._
--from The Lorax, Dr. Seuss
(Surprise surprise, this is not "pure" anapestic tetrameter. There are several substitutions of iambs for dactyls, including a pair at "smells slow-and-sour" one at "excep...," and another at "And deep." Furthermore, "of the Lifted Lorax," is an anapest followed by an obscure metrical foot called an amphibranch, whereas it should be three anapests.)

(Iambic Pentameter)
_My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; _
_Coral is far more red than her lips' red; _
_If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;_
_If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. _
_I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,_
_But no such roses see I in her cheeks; _
_And in some perfumes is there more delight _
_Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks._
_I love to hear her speak, yet well I know _
_That music hath a far more pleasing sound; _
_I grant I never saw a goddess go; _
_My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:_
_And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare _
_As any she belied with false compare._ 
--Sonnet 130, Shakespeare
(Needless to say, not "pure" iambic pentameter here, either. See if you can spot the substitutions! For example, there's one whole line that reads as though it were dactyls!)


FLAWS?
Now that these four famous and extremely successful poems, above, are revealed as having metrical "flaws," consider this: these poems are NOT flawed. They're all brilliant. Meter is not used as an absolute and inviolable rule. It is a guideline. It gains value by virtue of being used steadily, not by being used rigidly or absolutely.

OTHER METER
There are other theories of meter that're more easygoing-- they simply concentrate on obtaining the same number of accented syllables per line, or sometimes, simply the same number of total syallables. Neither of these approaches requires a tight repeated pattern of rythm within the line, only producing an approximate rythm from line to line.
Finally, in many languages, such as French and ancient Greek, there aren't really accents on syllables, and instead a percieved quality of syllable length or weight (based on the vowel and how any consonants are involved, I think, but I'm not sure I understand it).

LINE BREAKS
The breaks in lines of poetry ideally represent bite-sized whole ideas that stand on their own. They are indicated, when spoken, mainly by the regular length of the line and the rhyme at the end of the line, both of which the ear can easily hear. 

Succinctly expressing whole ideas, one line at a time, is a very compelling way to communicate an idea. Consider:

"Read. My. Lips.
"No. New. Taxes."

That's Bush senior-- and even though he raised taxes after being elected, those super-concentrated phrases (poets call such meter Molossic Monameter, BTW-- haha!) is like a bolt of lightning! It's like a pronouncement from on high! Pow, baby!

These ideas of concise expression on a per-line basis, of line-end rhymes, and of lines of fixed length, all reinforce each other in terms of creating a rhythmic, regular sense or structure in verse.


EVOCATION
The property that poets cite most often about what's important to do with poetry is to "have feeling." Poets go on and on about feeling. They're right that it's important, although sometimes they seem to be either exaggerating its importance or using it to cover a broader range of things than you and I think of when we think of "feeling." So evocative poetry really has to do two things: describe and feel.

DESCRIPTION


To evoke, to trigger the imagination, to trigger the feeligns that append to the imaginary currents that poems stir, all the same useful basics apply in poetry as in prose description:

Use all the senses, and use them realistically.
Choose your words carefully. Name things accurately. Use rich verbs.
Don't filter through clutter like "he saw the sun rise." Say "the sun rose."
Don't tell us what happens or what somebody's state is, show us. Don't say: "Frank was very upset, and stayed indoors all day." Say: "Frank never turned on the lights that day. Daylight seeped in as he sat at the cluttered kitchen table, the while tears seeped into his beard."
Give us imaginative comparisons by either saying one thing IS another (metaphor) or saying it's LIKE another (simile). "Her hair was a cuttlefish with a soggy death-grip on her buoy-shaped head." "Her hair was like a freshly opened package of raamen noodles-- brittle, tidy, and egg-yolk bright."
Don't hand us the same old cliche'd expectations. Either authentically observe something or skip it. Flowers can be terrifying. Old women can be soothing. Describe what's really there. Don't pick out a cliche to get your point across.
Learn to pick and choose details out of which the reader's mind constructs a vivid whole. Give us little imperfections until we're convinced there's a whole room full of them, and then move on.
If you do these things in poetry, you will have vivid poetry that opens up the imagination. That's the goal of description. If meter is the canvas, description is the pigments.

FEELING
Feeling is a special kind of description. It needs a keen eye for how things make people feel, how those feelings are manifest, and the difference between being maudlin and attention-seeking, overdone, and real emotion. A sense of people and the values of people and their interactions. This can be done very indirectly for the most part, though is often brought into sharp focus after lingering in the background of our thoughts-- which gives it the chance to really affect us. Think of feeling as a sixth sense, perhaps like smell most of all. Be aware of its rythms, study it.

STUDY
This brings up an important point. Whether sensory description, or the conveyance of feeling, you get good at it by actually paying close attention to your own experiences. It requires making conscious a lot of things you take for granted. Nobody can do this perfectly, but some are good at it.



VISION
Having something to say as a poet is the same as with any other writer. Every writer has to come to grips with the question: "Have I really got anything to say?" Vision, having something to say, is composed of: experience and imagination.

EXPERIENCE
Writers talk about "writing what you know," which is to say, set stories in eras you're familiar with, etc etc. Relate what you write to your own life experiences, and it's bound to be much richer than almost any other kind of writing you can do. That's certainly true in poetry as well. If you don't write from your own life experience, you're writing poetry crippled and blind.

IMAGINATION
The other side of it is that imagination can also furnish you with things to say. And while it's true that imagination is always colored by your life experiences, it's also true that your life experiences are colored by your imagination-- when things happen, you're also aware of what could have been, what might be, of what the thing suggests but isn't. And you even make choices about what you're going to seek out and experience based on your imagination.

So the two are complementary. One is empty without the other.


POETRY AS THEATRE
Finally, to understand poetry in the context of the real world and history is important. The first poetry was indeed oral-- people said it, they didn't write it down-- and it was the stories of gods and heroes, organized with meter and rhyme in order to make it easier to remember!

So meter and rhyme really are old, important players in poetry. Nowadays we write practically all poetry down, of course. But the reason it was so powerful back then was that not only does repetition make poetry easy to remember, it makes the mind open up to its message-- rythm is hypnotic.

And indeed, some of the most basic forms of religious practice are theatrical displays! And often involve chants and songs-- poetry-- much as they did with ancient Greek sacred theatre.

Obviously, for such religious people, the poetry-based stories had profound meaning-- they had vision. And ideally, they made people feel and envision very effectively, too.
All poetry, finally, is attempting to achieve a kind of heightened awareness-- a sacred space-- a kind of playful, make-believe, though potentially very serious -- sometimes even tragic or horrific, but ultimately theatrical-- experience. Repetition does this, good description and evocation of feeling create a dreamy world for this to take place in, a profound, clear message helps it cohere and seem worthwhile after the fact.



Poetry can be used on tombstones.
Poetry could be said at christenings. At births. At funerals and weddings.
Poetry should be in the best kind of love letters.
Poetry could legitimately be used to criticize, satirize, even cast down. And it can be very political. Explosive, even.
Poetry should awaken us when the tedium and banality of life bring us low.
Poetry can be like discovering a new erogenous zone.


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## Poetigress (Jun 25, 2008)

I think you've got something pretty solid, here.  As far as critique, here are a few things that stood out for me...

First, I'm not entirely sure who your intended audience is for this piece.  For my purposes here, though, I'm going to assume that this is meant for aspiring poets to give them a sense of background so they can go forward and explore these aspects more on their own.  If it's meant for some other purpose, adjust these comments accordingly. >^_^<



> Poetry is not therapy.



I understand (and agree with) what you're trying to say here -- that it isn't just about pouring every emotion out onto the page and then expecting the reader to care when you haven't actually communicated anything to them other than "I'm so depressed" or "I hate my family."  But this blanket statement does appear at first glance to ignore the fact that both writing and reading poetry can have therapeutic value.  Like it or not, a lot of people do write, period, for some therapeutic reason, and that original impulse doesn't mean that (after thoughtful revision) they can't use that raw material to come up with something worthwhile that can have meaning for other people.  After all, you do say later that poets should use their life experience.

The same goes for "Poetry is not literature."  I agree with the explanation following that statement (note that you have an 'it's' there that should be 'its'), but I'm not sure that most people are going to get where you're at by saying it isn't literature.  Instead, it comes across as almost an inflammatory statement, or at least a potentially confusing one.



> RHYME
> The most familiar trait of poetry, though not quite all poems use it



"Not quite all"?  This depends greatly on what era you're talking about.  If we're talking about contemporary poetry -- what's being written and read today -- the vast majority of it is free verse.  If you're speaking of poetry broadly, in terms of all poetry ever written, I suppose you could say "not quite all" and be correct percentage-wise, but if this is an essay meant to help people working today, what they're going to be encountering most often (and most likely attempting to write) is free verse.

I guess that's my main criticism of the essay as a whole.  I do feel there's an emphasis on meter and rhyme to the exclusion of free verse, and as someone who writes almost exclusively in free verse, I feel that the casual reader here would be forgiven for thinking that free verse is somehow a lesser form of poetry, based on the limited way it's addressed.  

(I do also think the difference between blank verse and free verse needs to be a little clearer for most people.  It's true that "poetry that doesn't use rhyming is referred to as blank verse", but as you say later, most free verse also doesn't use rhyme, and in general colloquial usage, "free verse" is used to refer to poetry that doesn't use either rhyme or meter.  To my knowledge, there are very few people today writing either blank verse or rhyming free verse -- most are either doing free verse or rhymed and metered forms.)

I especially like your section on description.

The only other thing I would add (again, if this is meant as a how-to) is the advice for poets to READ POETRY.  It gets said over and over by editors and teachers and everyone else, but it always needs to be said again.  Too many people writing poetry don't read it, or they don't read widely enough.  They only read what they encounter in their English classes (which usually ignores anything that's been written in the last few decades), or they only read what's online that was written last month and miss out on what can be gained from the more "classic" poetry.  

So I've always advised poets to read every kind of poetry they can get their hands on.  Scour the library shelves.  Read zines and ezines and literary journals (haunt either the larger or the more independent bookstores in your area).  Read classical, Beat, postmodern, contemporary, experimental, lyric, narrative, everything.  _Everything._  There's a lot about poetry that can be absorbed simply through experiencing as much of it, and as large a range of it, as possible.  If you can get to readings, go as often as you can.  Listen, and read your own work.  But not everyone lives in areas that do a lot of poetry readings, and everyone has at least some access to books.  Everything you read (just like everything you experience in life) will help you in some way, even if it's only to show you what you _don't_ want to write.  

Read poetry (even if you don't always get it) and your own work will improve -- even your fiction will improve -- that's one of the few guarantees anybody can ever give you in writing.

Okay, done with the passionate venting now.  >^_^<  In short, nice work here; it hangs together very well.  If I hadn't had to bow out of Mephit and could still do that poetry panel I was planning, this is very much the sort of thing I was planning on putting together as a handout.


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## TakeWalker (Jun 25, 2008)

To add a slight bit to the critique, I would take umbrage with the "poetry is not literature" line.

Look at it this way: what is literature? The way I learned it (fairly recently), literature is writing that is taught in literature classes. The canon of literature has a backbone of 'classic' works that have been taught for generations, yet it is both fluid and malleable if literature educators are willing to go against the grain and teach works that have not been canon for hundreds of years. To wit, what is canon in literature is entirely arbitrary; this is why we have women's lit and African-American lit and GLBT lit classes when such works were not taught and, in some cases, hardly even existed as a tangible genre a hundred or even fifty years ago.

This is a tangential way of saying, if poetry can be taught in a literature class, and it has been, it is therefore literature. It's a very 'flimsy' explanation/definition, I'll agree, but that's kind of the point.


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## Furthlingam (Jun 26, 2008)

THanks for reading that over for me, guys! Appreciate it!



Poetigress said:


> First, I'm not entirely sure who your intended audience is for this piece.


Heh, yeah. Actually I think it's about half for myself, and half for the various folks publishing under the "poetry" section on FA, whose work I try from time to time to read. IOW, yes, for aspiring poets.


> that original impulse doesn't mean that (after thoughtful revision) they can't use that raw material to come up with something worthwhile that can have meaning for other people.


 
If pressed on it, I might back down to admitting it's just a superstition on my part, but, I just don't think this is happens. Anyway, I admit it, I'm trying to dissuade people from making it a habit. This tiresome idea that good writing is the product of tortured souls in the heat of the moment... the whole "eccentric genius" myth... bah.



> "Not quite all"? This depends greatly on what era you're talking about.


 
You're right, I need to describe the situation more accurately. OTOH, I do also have an agenda; contemporary poetry often displays not a transcendence of, but what I judge to be a lazy indifference to rhyme and meter. And I think it owes a lot of this indifference to an ugly, nihilistic, solipsistic streak in modernism, that I've always disliked, and I think most people tend to dislike, rightly, because it simply doesn't take advantage of poetry's natural strengths. There's so much in the 20th century that is essentially an extended attempt to get the human aesthetic sensibility to accept something that's simply outside its register-- and there really is such a thing, and it really is bounded. 

IOW, you're right. I'm trying to say rhyme and meter (or at least a broader class of things I'm calling repetition that are exemplified in English verse by rhyme and meter), are essential to poetry. Not everybody is a Pound or Eliot, and I would genuinely take issue with Pound: the function of poetry is better served by the metronome than the musical phrase.

I'll add more on free verse, clarify about it (I thought I was making clear, blank is rhymeless, free is meterless AND generally rhymeless as most people recieve rhyme schmes as more forced than meter. But I'll fix that, TY.) and give it a more evenhanded treatment.



> The only other thing I would add (again, if this is meant as a how-to) is the advice for poets to READ POETRY.


 
Extremely good point. This needs to say that. I'll tell you a secret, too: I myself am not widely read, and don't recognize any particularly key things to know about reading poetry except my conviction, again, that it's a spoken art that's only incidentally written, and needs to be heard, not just absorbed via the eyeballs. 

Like I said in the intro, part of why I wrote this was to have a clear statement of my own intuitions before I get any more involved than I already am. Except for consulting my old trusty rhyming dictionary for the stupid greek terms once in a while, my ideas about poetry are either my own, or at least, I've forgotten where I originally picked them up.



> Everything you read (just like everything you experience in life)


 
*Just* like? Surely there're a range of things better tasted and touched than read about? I've been on one end of a dialectic with my ex-girlfriend about the poverty of experience through writing, for so long, that I can't stand to see my own stance stated that strongly. ^_^

Still: you're absolutely right. I don't do nearly enough to exhort my audience to read poetry. That will be in the next draft.



> The same goes for "Poetry is not literature." I agree with the explanation following that statement (note that you have an 'it's' there that should be 'its'), but I'm not sure that most people are going to get where you're at by saying it isn't literature. Instead, it comes across as almost an inflammatory statement, or at least a potentially confusing one.


 


TakeWalker said:


> To add a slight bit to the critique, I would take umbrage with the "poetry is not literature" line.
> Look at it this way: what is literature? The way I learned it (fairly recently), literature is writing that is taught in literature classes. The canon of literature has a backbone of 'classic' works that have been taught for generations, yet it is both fluid and malleable if literature educators are willing to go against the grain and teach works that have not been canon for hundreds of years. To wit, what is canon in literature is entirely arbitrary; this is why we have women's lit and African-American lit and GLBT lit classes when such works were not taught and, in some cases, hardly even existed as a tangible genre a hundred or even fifty years ago.
> This is a tangential way of saying, if poetry can be taught in a literature class, and it has been, it is therefore literature. It's a very 'flimsy' explanation/definition, I'll agree, but that's kind of the point.


 
I'm so glad you both take issue with this remark of mine, as it's my strongest single conviction re: poetry... not that I was just fishing for attention (honest). But I've always been convinced it's the essential problem with the way poetry is received.

Literature is that which is written down-- that which belongs written down, and has its primary and most important expression in that form. It's not that I think poetry shouldn't be taught. I'm saying it is distinct from literature, and suffers being taught as such, because by its nature, regardless of its recent history, it is oral, not written. It could exist entirely without writing-- indeed, the first things people used a WHOLE LOT of language in order to describe, were deeds of gods and heroes-- communicated orally from memory as poetry-- that is, with conventions of repetition that made the stories both easier to memorize and hypnotizing.

If I have an eccentric vision of the subject, that's it. I don't think it's really that eccentric, either. I know I've just picked the idea up from various places, and don't remember where.

I'll try and hammer out something less confusing and a better total description (if not necessarily less controversial). I'll also try and get it through a spell-cheker and so on. (>_< hope that wasn't too annoying)

Thanks again guys!


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## Poetigress (Jun 26, 2008)

Furthlingam said:


> If pressed on it, I might back down to admitting it's just a superstition on my part, but, I just don't think this is happens.



So you somehow can say for sure that none of the poems you like may have been born in the heat of the moment, and then, once cool, finely tuned and revised to a successful finished product?  That's quite a leap of faith on your part.



> OTOH, I do also have an agenda; contemporary poetry often displays not a transcendence of, but what I judge to be a lazy indifference to rhyme and meter. And I think it owes a lot of this indifference to an ugly, nihilistic, solipsistic streak in modernism, that I've always disliked, and I think most people tend to dislike,



You're making a lot of assumptions about what other people think based on your own opinions and agenda here, then.  If you judge this indifference to be caused by that streak, and you dislike it, that's fine.  I personally don't see the same phenomenon you're talking about, so I have no problem with it.  (Then again, as a writer, reader, and editor, my views on poetry have always been a little more practical and less academic/philosophical.) In general, though, I'd be careful using things like "most people" unless I had loads of other agreeing opinons to quote.



> I'm trying to say rhyme and meter (or at least a broader class of things I'm calling repetition that are exemplified in English verse by rhyme and meter), are essential to poetry.



Repetition of some kind may be essential.  Awareness of the sound of a poem, of the rhythms it contains, certainly is.  But I would argue that rhyme and meter, as traditionally used, are not.

For myself, and my own work, I prefer free verse because it allows the poem to influence its form, instead of having the form influence the poem.

Besides, frankly, you're fighting a battle on that score that, in my opinion, has already been lost years ago.  Have a look at, say, two or three dozen contemporary poets.  How many of them are writing in rhyme and meter?  Probably not more than a handful on a regular basis (not counting the occasional forays into form).  But they're hardly unaware of rhythm and sound and echoing repetition and all the effects that can be gained from that, simply because they're not writing in rhyme and meter.

I do fear that if you push this aspect too much, you might wind up turning off the very poets you're trying to reach, and then all your good advice that applies to _all_ poetry, of all forms, might not be heard.



> except my conviction, again, that it's a spoken art that's only incidentally written, and needs to be heard, not just absorbed via the eyeballs.



It began as a spoken art, but ever since it began to be written down, it has evolved and changed.  I believe that, now, it is both a spoken and a written art.  Not every good poem on the page can hold up to being read aloud; not every good poem that is heard holds up on the page -- I learned that both reading my own work and hearing other people's.  Spoken and written work are a bit like two different artistic media -- say, oils and watercolor.  You can get good work from both, but the qualities are different, and what works in one cannot always translate directly to the other.



> *Just* like? Surely there're a range of things better tasted and touched than read about?



I suppose I should have said "just as".  I wasn't claiming they were equal; I was alluding to the fact that both will influence a poet's work.



> It could exist entirely without writing



What about experimental poetry that uses the placement of words on the page -- and the typesetting -- to create various effects?  I don't think you could get the same results adding in pauses or other sounds.  That's part of poetry, as an art, that could not exist without text.

You might actually have two documents here with this essay -- one general how-to/overview for the aspiring poets on FA, and something more academic that goes into this philosophy in greater detail and argument.


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## TakeWalker (Jun 26, 2008)

Furthlingam said:


> Literature is that which is written down-- that which belongs written down, and has its primary and most important expression in that form. It's not that I think poetry shouldn't be taught. I'm saying it is distinct from literature, and suffers being taught as such, because by its nature, regardless of its recent history, it is oral, not written. It could exist entirely without writing-- indeed, the first things people used a WHOLE LOT of language in order to describe, were deeds of gods and heroes-- communicated orally from memory as poetry-- that is, with conventions of repetition that made the stories both easier to memorize and hypnotizing.



Okay, this makes more sense now, and I think my beef would be more with your wording. Unfortunately, I think Poey got to the counterargument first, but yes. I myself have written poetry that loses so much effect when read aloud, because it's meant to be viewed. Poetry definitely works better orally overall when compared to, say, the novel, but as a written medium, it is in no way 'polluted' or 'denatured'. It works just as well.


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## Furthlingam (Jun 26, 2008)

Poetigress said:


> So you somehow can say for sure that none of the poems you like may have been born in the heat of the moment, and then, once cool, finely tuned and revised to a successful finished product? That's quite a leap of faith on your part.


 
I'm saying that in principle, it's not how to expect to write good poetry, and if that's the approach everybody's taking, it's fail-- which by the way, a review of FA published poetry can demonstrate pretty clearly.

And while there're people who can ride high performance motorcycles up a ramp and jump five monster trucks, I would also refuse to acknowledge that possibility in a manual on how to safely have fun with your brand new motorcycle.



> In general, though, I'd be careful using things like "most people" unless I had loads of other agreeing opinons to quote.


 
And if the broadest possible audience has massively turned away from poetry to the point of being unwilling to even express an opinion on it, exactly because it's become feeble? We'd have a situation exactly like the one we actually have: art criticism being left to a class of self-conscious and status-conscious full-time critics. And critic-oriented poets who would disdain to write couplets for hallmark cards.

Yes, I have an agenda to rennovate, and yes that's ridiculously presumptuous. The battle isn't over, because poetry is not just whatever it is popularly thought to be. It doesn't arise out of convention-- which is the reason the overly mannered Victorian poetry the Modernists were reacting to is just as feeble as free verse often is. Poetry arises out of human nature, and is not receedingly subjective. 

If all poetry and memory of it were lost tomorrow, it would be, 1) a great loss for culture and civilization, but also 2) it would lead immediately to the world-shaking discovery of meter and rhyme, and how they create a hypnotic medium for the expression of fantasy and feelings of stunning power-- and we would call it Earteyope (NOT Yrteop, fond though I am of words that start with Y followed by a consonant.)



> But they're hardly unaware of rhythm and sound and echoing repetition and all the effects that can be gained from that, simply because they're not writing in rhyme and meter.


 
It's an interesting question, but the issue isn't the awareness of the poet, it's the poetry. That some poet has the strength to concieve and even write effectively without it doesn't mean it's his or her best work. I've read that Robert Frost once described writing free verse as playing tennis without a net. There's a point at which it really seems like reinventing the wheel. Like shadowboxing. Seems empty and alienating. What if modernist poets had instead reauthenticated steady rythm and sound in ways everyone can grasp-- maybe they all basically wasted their time!

"Let chaos swarm!
"Let cloud shapes storm!
"I wait for form."
-Robert Frost, Ten Mills/V. Pertinax (Strict iambic bimeter, monolithic rhyme scheme!)



> I do fear that if you push this aspect too much, you might wind up turning off the very poets you're trying to reach, and then all your good advice that applies to all poetry, of all forms, might not be heard.


 
True, true. OTOH, I don't necessarily want everyone (especially not at every point in their lives) to be a poet, and I don't necessarily want poetry to survive if its principles can't be grasped anymore.



> It began as a spoken art, but ever since it began to be written down, it has evolved and changed.


 
It comes from the expectations found in human nature and its use of langauge, which while variant among languages, really have not changed or evolved. Poetry IS something specific, at its root. By convention, we're calling things that are interesting to read on the page but don't work spoken aloud, poetry. 

Fine, if that's the way you want to conventionally use a word "poetry." Everything has to take its turn stepping up on the semantic treadmill, I suppose.

There remains in the room a big, sleek, powerful, fanged, deadly creature of very particular habits, regardless of which housecat you've coaxed into its former name. It could nom any housecat as an hors d'oeuvre, even if people have, from time to time, dressed it up in fancy gold bells.



> What about experimental poetry that uses the placement of words on the page -- and the typesetting -- to create various effects?


 
Experimental art. Were it not for Tom Waits, I would deny the whole category. Experimental poetry is fine for one's private journal or whatever, much like exercises and therapeutic poetry, or to show your pals and people who're kind enough to review your work, asking "Do you think this works at all?"

Does this work?: 
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1247266/

It doesn't, because the secondary rhymes don't reach the intuition, much less consciousness. The half-dipthong rhyme works-- it's exactly why "Tiger tiger burning bright/...night/...eye" absolutely rhymes with "symmetry." But the rest-- no.

As any respectable forum troll often demonstrates (usu. with a yawn), almost any aspect of anything treated with enthusiasm can be derisively dismissed. Daydreaming can be. Rhyme can be. Meter can be. Orthographic conventions can be. So can the value of human life or the deliciousness of pears or sex. That doesn't mean orthographic conventions rate with meter and rhyme. Any more than meter and rhyme really rate with daydreams, ripe pears, or sex.

Not that I disdain poetry in a world with flavor and color, or orthographic games in a world with poetry. If I say graphical poems don't rate with good readable poetry, yes, you can use the standard response: "So, you're saying it's wrong because you don't like it." But that's not what I'm saying.



> You might actually have two documents here with this essay -- one general how-to/overview for the aspiring poets on FA, and something more academic that goes into this philosophy in greater detail and argument.


 
That's probably just the argument I'm having with myself. It's my concern that the issues involved really are primary, rather than "academic," that keeps the argument going.

I'm ubar greatful for your feedback; I don't mean to put you into the middle of an argument between me and me. Hehe. I'm also aware you may have things to do besides this forum chatter.


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## Poetigress (Jun 26, 2008)

Fair enough.  I just think your bias against contemporary free verse is going to turn a lot of people off if you still intend to use this as an accessible intro to writing and appreciating poetry.  I mean, frankly, it's starting to turn me off, and I like poetry.   But if that's okay with you, then it works.  I just think we'll have to agree to disagree on the importance of rhyme and meter, as well as on what "poetry" is.  But I don't think very many people have ever truly agreed on what poetry is, at any time, anyway.


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## Furthlingam (Jun 26, 2008)

TakeWalker said:


> I myself have written poetry that loses so much effect when read aloud, because it's meant to be viewed. Poetry definitely works better orally overall when compared to, say, the novel, but as a written medium, it is in no way 'polluted' or 'denatured'. It works just as well.


 
Right, true: things you mention having written almost certainly stand up on their own just fine in the presence of X (which is, poetry that works best and even relies upon being heard rather than read). I don't think that kind of work is polluted. I am saying that not only is X a distinct form, it's a very robust and meaningful form that derives its strength from its bounds, that many don't entirely grasp, because a sense of those bounds has been obscured.

I've toyed with the idea of writing an essay on something called "Word Furs," and describing poetry withOUT using the word "poetry" at all, inventing a furry-sounding terminology, and insisting on certain conventions including meter and rhyme, an emphasis on accurate sensoral descriptions (especially smell), and nonsensical, metaphorical categories of poems relating to biological classification (e.g., nocturnal, crepuscular, frugivorous, digitgrade, etc, poems), as a kind of reboot of poetry, strictly inside the fandom.

I suppose feedback could have driven me toward or away from that project. You guys are great, I think I'll have to do it now.  Just don't tell anybody my secret plan, or they won't be fooled.


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