What do you get out of poetry?

[Cat_Jones]

@WordMan

I think poetry gets a bad rap because:

• 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…

Yup I’ll agree with that, except the work bit - if you like it, you like it. “Good” is subjective, especially where “art” is concerned.

I’d also add that saying you don’t like poetry is like saying you don’t like music. There are so many styles, genres you can’t not like them all; IMHO that is. The other similarity is this … how many of us enjoy reading music ? Unless you’re a real musician, you’ve got to hear it right ? Listening to it it becomes clearer. Same thing with poetry … reading Dylan Thomas in your head things get all tongue-twisty, hearing it for real and the rhythm becomes clear.

I sometimes go to “Slam Poésie” evenings in a local bar here in Paris - it’s kinda like an open mic - now I may not enjoy all the poems but you’ve gotta admire them - some make me laugh, some make me sad, some are lyrical, some rap and yes some are over-indulgent look at me aren’t I clever but … I don’t like free jazz either

So, to the OP, what do I get out of poetry ? A distillation; a whisky which needs sipping and considering, which can’t be rushed even if I want to … in a sense I save it for special occasions, I can’t multi-task as I might whilst gulping down a can of fizzy fiction.

[Johnny_Angel]

@CJJ

The “what” of the poem is primary, the “how” comes later.

I would say the exact opposite is true. “What” and “how” are yoked together, but we’re not talking about a chicken-and-egg situation. Whatever poetry is, it is a function of technique, not of content. Poetry is poetry because of how it’s done. The message is an emergent property of the means.

[Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela]

@Thudlow_Boink

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.

It might be more helpful to see the entire thing -

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower - Book I

There is also Book II, Book III and Coda. It is the last poem in Journey to Love 1955, and it also represents pages 310 - 337 of The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume II 1939 - 1962. Not that I feel you need to read it in its entirety, just that I thought you should know there’s more to it than just one sentence.

I find it really interesting that many people are expressing their difficulty with the line endings (Enjambment is the fancy literary term for it, for anyone who cares.) - the general thought is that poets use enjambment to reflect the actual way in which people speak. On the other hand, people do not naturally speak in rhyme, meter or form, yet many people are expressing a preference for poetry which deliberately does not reflect the way in which people speak.

(A highlight of every school year at York University’s theatre department was the annual lecture given by Mavor Moore when he would speak for the entire afternoon in blank verse, including taking questions from the floor. My friend studied in his class in the sixties, and said it was incredible - the only evidence that something unusual was going on was the way in which Prof. Moore drummed his fingers on the desk while he spoke. That was his way of counting beats.)

Perhaps the essential difference is that in traditional poetry, the reader can easily perceive the effort the poet has made to choose the words and string them together. It isn’t immediately apparent why the poet has chosen to break lines in the same way that it is apparent that a sonnet is in iambic pentameter and has a rhyme scheme of a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g.

To return to what I said about enjambment reflecting the way people speak in real life, try this - listen to what happens in your own speech and in other people’s speech as you pursue a thought and search for the next word to express the idea. The last word before the new word you’re searching for gets extended, or suspended. When the next word arrives, there’s a landing and a rushing forward. It’s as though a skier hits a mogul, goes up, takes air for a minute and lands cleanly, speeding off. Try listening for it over the next little while.

Traditional poetry is more regular - like a pendulum, or a metronome. Modern poetry is a lot more like you have a weight on a string hanging from your hand, and you can move your arm back and forth to change when and for how long it suspends.

That’s one acting approach to the line endings - the idea that they’re like the flags on a slalom course, forcing you to stay in control and go around instead of just crashing downhill, following the rush of your thought without any care for what image you use to give it voice. (The winter olympics must be coming up - all my metaphors today have been about skiing.) Enjambments are there to channel the flow of speech.

Another useful exercise for actors is to breathe at all the line endings - sometimes that tells us useful things about what the poet had in mind. Fundamentally, though, the job is to take what’s there and make sense of it - it isn’t our job to change it to suit ourselves. It’s pretty much the same job for actors, singers, composers, musicians - anyone who is dealing with ‘taking the poem off the page.’

For some, enjambment is a way for the poet to give you the rhythm and accent of the phrase. Consider how in the following questions -

What is Le Ministre doing?
What is Le Ministre doing?
What is Le Ministre doing?
What is Le Ministre doing?

• the same four words ask a slightly different version of the same question. Instead of resorting to bold, the poet can use the line endings -

What
is Le Ministre doing?

What is
Le Ministre doing?

What is Le Ministre
doing?

What is Le Ministre doing?

For fun,

It’s hard to get the news from poems
For facts do not abound there.
Yet people die or lose their homes
For lack of what is found there.

is similar in its ideas, but it’s in rhyme and form. Despite my best efforts of the last ten minutes, I don’t think for a second that I improved on the original. For starters, the second line is completely unnecessary, I hate the redundant ‘there’ in 2 and 4, and ‘lack’, which was the line end of a 2 beat line is now buried in the middle where it doesn’t do much of anything… I prefer the William Carlos Williams version, especially in context.

And now my coffee’s cold and the washing machine is finished - the life of an artist…

[Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela]

@jsgoddess

I once considered doing an “Ask the poet” thread but I figured it would sink like a stone.

Well, I’d be interested, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

[Johnny_Angel]

@Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela

I find it really interesting that many people are expressing their difficulty with the line endings (Enjambment is the fancy literary term for it, for anyone who cares.) - the general thought is that poets use enjambment to reflect the actual way in which people speak. On the other hand, people do not naturally speak in rhyme, meter or form, yet many people are expressing a preference for poetry which deliberately does not reflect the way in which people speak.

Enjambment is not used to reproduce natural speech. What is actually natural doesn’t require enjambment to achieve it. Enjambment defies expectations, shifts important words to the sharp ends of lines, and visually enforces between what is said at one moment and what the audience is pre-dispositioned to hear next. Okay, it is a useful technique to limit a reader’s choices about interpreting emphasis, but that’s not really what it’s about.

The technique has been proven effective in enough cases that it must be taken seriously despite that it is mostly used in blind fumblings by people looking to excrete their feelings without the bother of studying the underlying music of the language. A powerful language instinct guides even the untutored where to break these lines for effect, but that is not any more reliable than the same instincts that tell others that enjambment is somehow facile and vacuous.

Traditional poetry is more regular - like a pendulum, or a metronome.

Unless you know a metronome with its own internal and varying rhythms that now support and now counterpoint the broader rhythm, then this metaphor is not going to hold together.

[CJJ]

@Johnny_Angel

I would say the exact opposite is true. “What” and “how” are yoked together, but we’re not talking about a chicken-and-egg situation. Whatever poetry is, it is a function of technique, not of content. Poetry is poetry because of how it’s done. The message is an emergent property of the means.

Allow me to clarify. For the audience that is reading/listening/understanding/interpreting a modern poem, “what” it is conveying comes first; “how” it conveys this material comes later. I think your interpretation is taken from the perspective of the writer; if so I agree.

[CJJ]

@The_Hamster_King

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.

Perhaps that sense of ambiguity is the consistent effect the poet is going for. That would certainly explain the current literary fetish regarding irony:-)