With no meter and no rhyme,
I can,
Write like this and anyone who says its not poetry,
I can claim is uncultured and does not understand my art.
Saying that poetry does not require rhyme is not the same as saying that everything which doesn’t rhyme is poetry.
Saying that some great art breaks the rules is not the same as saying that everything which breaks the rules is great art.
Saying that good thoughts can be expressed in a post is not the same as saying that every post expresses good thoughts.
You can indeed claim that. But a point which has been reiterated throughout this thread is that poetry is more than rhyme and meter, more than words, more than an arbitrary arrangement of lines on the page.
Poetry is not precisely language, any more than a Francis Bacon portrait, for instance, is precisely a person’s appearance. Poetry is images, poetry is at once as barren as desert sand and as fertile the soil of river bottoms, poetry is an echo in your bones.
A poem, a good poem, has no unnecessary words; every word, every line break, every stanza break was sweated over, worked at, and weighed against other possibilities (I’ve worked on some poems for as long as five years) before a final version is chosen (by final, I don’t mean perfect, it’s simply a state where any more changes would do more harm than good).
In order to be affected by a poem, or by any work of art, you must make yourself vulnerable to it. You must let it take the first swing. Some will knock you out with that first punch. Some will leave you gasping. Some will dance on the edges of perception before they hit you like a flurry of combinations.
It can be a frightening experience to have someone’s creation rabbit punch you, or slip into your gut cold as a blade. We have our defences up constantly against such invasions. We have to in this world of ours, with so many media clamouring for our attention, offering to do all our work, all our thinking and feeling with sound bites and video clips.
But poetry is hard. It is not satisfied with a five second glance from us. If that is all we give it, we get very little back. Poetry, like a good lover, demands your attention and responds with escalating degrees of recipriocity.
On the first page of this thread, I said:
And I meant it. Poetry, literature, all art forms learn from the past; they do not duplicate it, they flow from it. What has been done has been done.
Having said all that, and having referred you, on the first page of this thread, to some modern poets, I’ll leave you with three recent things of my own, which will appear in my next book, and, oddly enough, play off the ancient Persian ghazal form.
Be well,
jm
Three Poems
copyright © 2001 by John MacKenzie
Green Leaves
It is January, but I am thinking of green
Leaves in the rain
And how, on their edges,
Water gathers like moments
How under the sound of the rain
There is another sound
A ripping (of dry leaves)
As the skin of water stretches
And each drop is hung, like time,
From gravity’s thin strings
The Content of Winter
In January,
Even god is silent,
Lest words find their true form,
Water. Turn to ice in this air.
And some days, only crows dare
To move. Absolute
In their skate across vision,
They could be angels;
Devoid of mercy, or cruelty.
Meaning.
This is how hate feels
Sometimes you see a face and think
you, I remember you
how you drummed drummed drummed
how everything you did was one more attempt
to drive the world to your rhythm
how you dried the skin of everyone you touched,
stretched them tight
the sound of your voice ground the full moon to nothing
but dust and metal shards scattered
on the sky underfoot
I remember how your tongue is a black brush
how night is something you speak
sublime.
nothamlet (John): Very nice work, there, and a very powerful description of how heightened language can affect the reader. I hesitate to say how much impact it’ll have on the OP; someone so blind to the possibilities of language may very well be able to read your poetry and totally miss what’s so wonderful about it. We shall see…
Thanks, Spiritus, Cervaise.
As far as the OP goes, well… someone once said, “Why do I bang my head against the wall? Because it feels so good when I stop.”
I can’t tell you what poetry is, but I know it when I read it. Nothamlet, great stuff! A little bit of Relativity thrown in?
Some time ago, a guy I knew wrote a poem for the local running rag about a runner on a forest trail with dry leaves: fully of imagery, thought, and symbolism. That was a poem.
Nothamlet, you say it took you five years to write a poem. I asked that guy how long it took him to write that. He replied, “A lifetime.” Now that’s bullshit.
Those five years felt like five lifetimes, barbitu8. Ha. Of course I was doing other things besides poetry. The poems I was talking about were ones I started and could find no way to finish. I kept coming back to them whenever I’d pick up a pen. I had the thoughts and images I needed, but for a long time I did not have the skill needed to shape them.
Also – and this is important – all poets are liars. Ha.
jm
I’d just like to make it clear that the ending of my last post was an attempt at self-deprecating humour. It was not intended tp refer to (thankfully resolved) board events of the past few days.
jm
What board events? 
Just wanted you to know, Green Leaves has been percolating through my thoughts for teh last two days. I am unfamiliar with the Persian form you mention, so to me it feels like a very successful fusion of a traditional Chinese “feel” and a sharp Imagist focus.
I like it very much.
A few links if you have the time or interest.
http://www.ahapoetry.com/ghazal.htm
http://members.aol.com/poetrynet/ghazals/
http://www.michaelbryson.com/danforth/danforth2_1/reviews/steeves.html
http://argosy.mta.ca/argosy98-99/100898/features/features1.htm
I was pleased to find that John Thompson, whose work first interested me in the form, was mentioned in the first link I followed. I recommend his book Stilt Jack as the best ghazals I know of written in English. The argosy article is muddled, but is an accurate, though not complete, account of his life and death.
I’m glad Green Leaves is following you around – that’s one of the reasons I write.
jm
If that’s all there is to it, you would be a fool not to invest in a canvas and some old shoes… you’d be paid back 10000X. That’s better than the stockmarket before the dotcom bust.
One of my favorite poems is by an (unknown) third-grader:
Nothing is perfect.
Only the dew.
And that, only half.
Pretentious, perhaps, but then again he was probably drunk. Don’t all artists draw on whatever they’ve learned, heard, stole, absorbed, invented, discarded and forged in the smithy of their soul up to that point in their life in creating anything?
I don’t get the joke. In two pages, I think this is the one statement we all can agree on 
I give a lot of leeway to artists as to “what IS art.”
(This post is really about poetry but I’ll tackle visual arts first.)
For instance, a person can splash some paint on a canvas and call it “art”. I would be inclined to agree with that person, because art, to me is “Communication of a message through a medium”. If something is completely lacking in message, then yes, it is not art, but I am not one to decide that the artist did not intend to convey a message: I give them the benefit of the doubt.
The question, then, becomes: it is art, but is it GOOD art?? thats another story entirely. Nearly all, okay, ALL abstract painting I have ever seen i would not call “Good” works of art, because they did not convey a message to me even if one was intended.
Good patterns, yes, but if all I wanted was a pretty picture, I could pick up a Kincade that looks 1000 times better than the best abstract art, and heck, communicates more to me.
On to poetry.
I think that ALL poetic devices need to be weighed when deciding if a composition is/isnt good poetry. Meter, rhyme, allusion, alliteration, textual positioning, metaphor, etc. There can also be a difference betwee
More to the point, if an artist wants to convey a message WITHOUT making intense use of all the “Poetic” devices, and simply allows others to view this composition, WITHOUT CLAIMING THAT SAID WORK IS POETRY, why do some people feel the need to dismiss it? Just approach it as a work of art: granted, poetic devices may make it a better work of art, but lack thereof does not mean it isnt art at all.
If we say that a:
–short composition, that
–conveys a message using minimal necessary words, and
–does NOT make use of rhyme or meter
is NOT poetry, we need to make ANOTHER CATEGORY for such short “non-poetic” works. (“epigram” wont do as that implies a much shorter work than I usually see and implies a limited subject)
My works, for instance. When I write “intense, short compositions”, I dont intentionally try to include all poetic devices just so my work can be proclaimed as poetry by the Art Gods.
But I do try to keep an ear out for euphony (and dysphony when needed, if that’s a word) I write my works to sound as if they are being spoken (euphoniously and with a cadence, if not meter, usually.)
Is what I do “poetry”? I dont really care. Sometimes I use poetic devices when I know that using them will help convey a message.
Is it good art? No. What I make isnt really good art (my short, intense compositions, that is.) If I used poetic devices appropriately, consistently, and well, it would make my message much more effective. That will come with time (I have only written four of these works in my adult life, not counting light verse or song lyrics.)
Is it art? Yes, it is.
i have no clue as to what should go after this:
“Meter, rhyme, allusion, alliteration, textual positioning, metaphor, etc. There can also be a difference betwee…”
when poetry from one language is translated
it is difficult to get the rhymeing
maybe the meter
but essentially the spirit:)
[bold] Ludovic [/bold], do you have James Kilpatrick’s * the Art of Writing *? He’s big on cadence and euphonics, though not specific to poetry; however, he believes that all writing should be poetry in that sense. I have mentioned his name before on some English threads and posters have objected to his positions. But he believes, above all, that writing should flow, have cadence, and be poetic.
I just have to chime in to note that in my (admittedly limited) experience, no type of poetry has been as sorely abused as rhymed poetry. The stuff they publish in a little local paper here actually makes my brain hurt…but it’s poetry! Because it RHYMES!
There is, of course, plenty of unrhymed gibberish passing for “it’s poetry 'cause it’s what I FEEL, dude” out there. Overall, though, I’d take bad unrhymed poetry over bad rhymed poetry any day. At least there is some small chance of running across a fresh image when the writer isn’t forcing the language to fit the dawn/lawn/hmm…lesseee…PAWN! scheme.
Of course, I’m biased, because I write unrhymed poetry. And querty, it’s good stuff…it’s not just random writing with funny line breaks. This stuff takes WORK. If you truly haven’t found any good unrhymed poetry out there, you aren’t looking in the right places. I’m sure more suggestions for your reading pleasure will come out of this thread.
Best,
karol
Um, I linked from here to this thread as an example of the possibilities for poetic discussion. I did not mean for this thread to be re-opened. The SDMB policy on old threads is discussed here . The policy on posting in general can found here.
Please, if you want to open a discussion on what defines poetry, it would probably be best to start a new thread in the Cafe Society forum.
jm