It’s interesting you say that - I had a roommate many years ago who was a fascinating fellow. He was getting his Master’s in Mathematics, he was a poet, spoke Japanese fluently as a second language and played the Koto.
One night, both of us pissed to the gills, I asked him how he could balance Mathematics and Poetry - they seemed so opposite to me. He said “To me, there’s no difference between an elegantly stated proof and a Yeats poem.” He went on to say “The biggest problem with Mathematics is that you need to get past the drudgery they teach you in school to begin to see the beauty. At least with Music, you can listen to something and hear the beauty, even if you don’t yet understand music. Imagine if your piano teacher taught you nothing but scales, and you heard no other music. That’s what it’s like when a school teacher uses the multiplication tables as an instrument of pedagogical torture.”
He went on to show me some proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem, and how it can be proven in different ways. (Even that level of Math is a stretch for me - I only understand it because of the 3-4-5 rule in carpentry…) He was absolutely right - there was a real elegance to how some of the proofs had been expressed, that went far beyond anything I had ever experience of Math.
And it made me grateful that as a musician, I had been able to hear the distant goal all around me even as I plowed through the most repetitive scales and arpeggios…
I think this is precisely what the problem is in our modern age, though this is not to say that such snobbery is new. Here’s one way to break it down:
[ul]
[li]The standard approach to teaching literature is to present it as something handed down from on high, and the student is expected to “get it” or just be stupid. Among the results of this, when they turn to composing their own poems, they expect other people to “get it” or they are stupid.[/li][li]The breakdown of formal versification makes poetry less accessible, and makes it harder to critique, further putting the burden on the reader to just “get it”.[/li][li]In fact, many readers reject the entire thing and develop an aversion to poetry in general.[/li][li]Poets then go on to lament, “Why don’t these stupid idiots who suck want to hear my poems?”[/li][/ul]
But in fact, my claim is that everybody likes poetry. The brain is wired for language, and poetry is a game played with language, successfully or not. Usually people who claim not to like poetry turn out to really dislike the obnoxious baggage that comes with the way poetry is celebrated – the pheauitry, if you will.
Another load of horseshit often parceled with poetry is that poets are somehow deeper and more sincere. But in fact, everybody has deep and sincere feelings. It’s just that most people don’t feel they have the right to have their depth and sincerity validated by an audience.
I enjoy poetry that conveys ideas/stories/images using very strict grammatical constructs. For me, the beauty lies in the language and the algorithm. The deconstructional free verse side of poetry, on the other hand, is just talentless thesaurus-cribbing wankery to me.
it requires more work than text - it looks just like normal text but you have to unpack the lines a lot more to get to the various feelings and emotions
it is risky - almost like becoming a wine expert. Bad poetry is truly abysmal, great poetry is exceptional and in the middle is this big gray area where it takes work to figure out if it is any good and even then you could end up feeling foolish if you risk stating your opinion out loud…
It’s a good point. Also worth mentioning is that young children love poetry in general, and some very good poetry and wordplay is written for them. Obviously it isn’t necessary for the audience to be highfalutin’ sophisticates to enjoy poetry: my 3 year old does.
It’s a nifty statement about poetry, but I’d be hard-pressed to explain why it counts as a Poem, rather than just an ordinary sentence that happens to be broken up into lines. There’s no rhyme, no meter, no poetic devices, and nothing that would be lost if it were translated into another language. And I can understand why some people think that, when it comes to modern poetry, the Emperor has no clothes.
A “good” poem is one that either in its entirety or a significant piece can be recited. It means that the poem touched your spirit in some way, IMHO.
“Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands,
And the muscles of his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.”
“You may have wealth untold,
Caskets of silver and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you never can be;
I had a mother who read to me”.
Mostly, it’s boring. A lot of modern poetry (like modern art) suffers from the deadly boring combination of mediocrity and narcissism.
Freeform verse rarely interests me – it’s a little too easy to make something arty by use of the return key (the poetry equivalent of throwing poo at your painting – rarely done well).
I find extreme constraints on form much more interesting, as in haiku.
I think Sturgeon’s Law applies to poetry- 95% of it is crap. And I agree that modern poetry and modern art both suffer from narcissism. I was talking about this thread with a poetry-loving friend of mine, and agreed that you’re more likely to like poetry if you started off with it very young (A. A. Milne, A Child’s Garden of Verses), and it was never an alien form. Rhyme is fun. Metered poetry is fun. Unmetered poetry can be beautiful, although it’s a tricky medium.
I think most poetry needs to be read aloud, that the sound it makes, the rhythm of the words, is part of the beauty, and reading aloud isn’t something most of us do anymore, unless it’s to children.
Because it’s a short poem I particularly like.
You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.
Well, at least you need to “read it aloud in your head.”
We’ve had at least one thread about whether or not people hear the words in their head when they read something silently to themselves. (Some people do, some people don’t, and some people do sometimes.) I think that, to appreciate poetry, you pretty much have to hear it, if only in your head.
On the other hand, a bad reading aloud can kill a poem. I remember my first exposure to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells.” It was in a high school literature textbook, and when I read it to myself, I thought, Wow, this is really cool, and I love the sound-effects. Then the teacher had the class read the poem aloud, and I thought, Bleah, this isn’t nearly as cool as the poem I heard in my head.
Well, that’s Housman in a nutshell for you. And his opus represents another answer to the question of what we get out of poetry, a theme he returned to often:
We find our own feelings captured in the words of long-dead poets, and it helps us understand and cope with them. The poet plants it now so you can dig it later:
Because even angsty verses are a comfort to the stricken:
I’m a poet, so what I get out of poetry is a lot of enjoyment and many of my closest friends. It’s a remarkably varied artform and one that is so adaptable and flexible that it offers an endless variety of ways to play and delight.
I know hundreds of poets and the only thing we all have in common is a love of the art and, at least for most, a strong desire to be read.
I’m constantly learning new things and having my world turned upside down. I feel like I’ve grown through poetry at least as much as I’ve grown through any other experience in my life. It’s simply a fundamental part of my makeup.
I once considered doing an “Ask the poet” thread but I figured it would sink like a stone.
Just to be clear, the first three criteria cited for judging a poem–meter, rhyme, “poetic” devices–are specifically rejected by modern poets beginning with the Imagist movement. The Imagists thought poetry should convey ideas and emotions through precise language. A poet who chose language to fit a meter, or make a rhyme, or pay obeysance to poetical devices (like e.g. archaic language–you’ll seldom find a word like 'twas or ere in modern poetry, unless it’s used ironically) isn’t really as committed to conveying an image as he/she is to sounding cute or proper.
At first blush this sounds a lot like the definition of prose, but the imagists argued that even standard prose intrudes on the bare image. Prose of course has it’s own conventions (less strict than traditional poetry), but even after stripping these out it must still follow a pre-connected train of thought or rational line. For example, most folks wouldn’t approve of prose like: “I saw a crying man. I was wondering. He was ashamed.” To make this acceptable, a writer should insert additional language or reorganize these discrete sentences into a single train of thought. Since the imagists wanted to convey emotions, they believed forcing them into rational modes of speech would consequentially diminished their power.
For better or worse, this interpretation of poetry has dominated in English ever since. I for one appreciate both approaches, but the mistake often made with modern poetry, I think, isn’t in the poet’s imagist goals, but in assuming that–because the poet may not have had any organizing or rational principles in mind–the resulting poem cannot be interpreted or criticized using rational principles. Good modern poetry–like much good traditional poetry–is judged by the consistent effect it produces in the reader/listener, and the poetic methods are simply a means to that end. Some traditional poetry–especially in the Victorian age–seems to reverse this by judging poetry as an intellectual exercise, sometimes considering the content and message purely as a side effect.
A good example of what I’m talking about comes in recitation. Once the meter/rhyme scheme/structure of a sonnet is explained to you, it’s fairly easy to properly read any sonnet aloud (or, perhaps, it should be easy–let’s just say the learning curve is more favorable). For imagist stuff like the William Carlos Williams piece, lets state right off that there aren’t the same detailed cues for skilled recitation. However if you read it aloud, then aloud again, then again, I daresay you will natrually begin to emphasize certain words, take a caesura pause in certain spots, and begin to feel a rhythm to the piece. I’d also say if two people did this separately they would eventually develop a similar diction (not identical–this is after all a poem, not a science experiment). Read enough poems like these and you begin to see how a natural cadence develops, and you begin to “get it” on the first try.
That, to me, says the poet himself is doing something with the language beyond stating the bland fact that poetry is essential though it contains little in the way of news… How Williams does it is well worth a critical analysis, and I think it’s legitimate to find an intellectual approach to the piece as well the emotional one. But let’s not put the cart before the horse: The “what” of the poem is primary, the “how” comes later.
I guess I was one of those lucky ones who got introduced to poetry as a small child in a much more fun way than Lynn. (I cringed for you, hun. How awful!)
I also grew up in New England and so when some friends and I went walking, we would recite “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” AS two roads diverged in the yellowed wood, and it did make all the difference.
I love it, and that’s probably why I write it. Unfortunately, some of what I’ve written was downright awful, written in the moony teenage years of angst and anger. But some of it, even now, immediately whisks me back to where I was and how I felt.
I enjoy writing poetry, and I have been known to give double meanings, but I write for my enjoyment and not necessarily for others. And the narcissism I may be guilty of. Cause I do get some enjoyment when I am able to aptly capture how I feel, or express it to others.
There are a few poems that I love. One is “If” by Rudyard Kipling. Those verses have gotten me through a lot of hard times.
And then there are phrase I love. Like Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. . .”
I disagree. One of the things I value most highly in poetry is interpretive openness and ambiguity, which is pretty much the opposite of producing a consistent effect in the reader.
