Poetry Column 1: What is poetry?

[Taika of Narfell]

What is poetry? What defines poetry? What makes a poem?

Is it rhyme? Is it rhythm? Is it the message? The lyrical language? The emotion? If the writer calls it poetry, does that make it poetry?

Here I will take a look at the different things that factor into our judgement of whether it is poetry or not.

So what is it that makes a poem?

Rhyme
We can all think of words that rhyme. Dog/fog isn't too hard to come up with, nor is house/mouse, standard rhymes that pretty much everyone can think of. "The tiny grey mouse/ lived in a house" is not poetry it's a rhyme - maybe even a children's rhyme. So rhyming alone is clearly not enough to make it poetry. So when can the rhymes themselves contribute to making the rhyme a poem?

The answer is simple: Don't be simple.

All those simple rhymes are children's rhymes, and if you only use those in a poem you'll find it difficult to move beyond the children's rhyme status. Using a few once in a while when they fit won't ruin anything, of course, but be clever. Cleverness when rhyming is always appreciated by the reader, because cleverness usually gets a positive reaction of some sort, be it an "Ohh", an "Ah hah!" or an "I see...".

Finding precise rhymes for long words can be difficult, but sometimes near-rhymes are good enough and perfectly allowable like exacerbate/to macerate. Anyone who reads Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken will see that rhymes such as these...

"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

... have taken far more thought and puzzling than rhymes like Backstreet Boys'...

"Quit playin' games with my heart
Before you tear us apart
Quit playin' games with my heart
I should've known from the start
You know you've gotta stop
You're tearin' us apart
Quit playin' games with my heart"

There is not doubt here as to what is poetry and what is merely a song with a rhyming refrain.

But are the rhymes really necessary? No of course they're not. Otherwise a poet like Walt Whitman would never have been a poet. Just consider his...

"A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark'd, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark'd how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them--ever tirelessly speeding them."

Nothing that even gets close to rhyming, but poetry nonetheless.

Rhythm
Does a poem need rhythm in order to be a poem? To answer that we need to define rhythm. Do we mean a steady rhythm that can be given an old Greek term for a name? Or do we mean an underlying rhythm beneath the word-flow?
In poetry we usually talk of an actual rhythm scheme, so let us stick to those so as not to confuse too many terms. Speaking of rhythm this way, we call it meter.

The classic iambic meter most people will have heard in Shakespeare's sonnets is very common in the English language. English is iambic in nature and most of what we write in terms of poetry will come out with a naturally iambic meter. Consider the lines...

"To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride,"

... from Shakespeare's 104th sonnet. Exemplary iambic meter all the way. But consider then these lyrics from the Icelandic singer Björk's Triumph of a Heart:

"Smooth soft red velvety lungs
Are pushing a network of oxygen joyfully
Through a nose, through a mouth
But all enjoys, which brings us to
The triumph of a heart that gives all"

There is no meter, no pre-determined rhythm and yet it is a song with a tune. Most if not all of her lyrics qualify as poetry but there is no rhythm other than what the music brings.

So we must conclude that rhythm isn't needed to make a poem either.

Message
So, is it the message that makes a poem a poem? Is it what the writer is trying to say that makes a poem what it is?
Let us consider what one might be saying in a poem.

"A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad,--
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, splashless, as they swim. "

The above is Emily Dickinson's A Bird Came Down The Walk. A well-liked one of her pieces, and indeed there is wonderful imagery in it... but what is the message? It is certainly not plain as day what the message might be - if there is one. This one is not an easy poem to analyse, but can we truly consider the message an important part of poetry if we sometimes have to thoroughly analyse the poem in order to even have a clue as to what the message might be? Is this good writing-economics?

The message of a poem is not always easy to pin down and define - except maybe for the writer herself. But does there *have* to be a message? Consider Björk's complete lyrics to The Anchor Song:

"i live by the ocean
and during the night
i dive into it
down to the bottom
underneath all currents
and drop my anchor

and this is where i'm staying

this is my home"

There is no message here. It depicts a feeling, a state even, but not a message. And yet this is poetry. So clearly poetry doesn't need a message in order to be what it is. What then?

Emotion
As Harold Bloom once said: "Bad poetry is always honest" and this statement often pertains to emotion. There's a trend in modern society for writing poetry when you have feeling you want to let out. Many people do it, and they end up putting some very, very personal thoughts and feelings on paper (or on screen as the case may be). There is nothing wrong with this per se, but such emotional poetry holds a major weakness: the writers are reluctant to go back and edit it because they feel it is a violation of their feelings. This leaves much of this emotional poetry unedited, and while the emotion may be honest the poetry can very well still be crap - to be blunt.

For all poets it is important to realise these two basic concepts:
Emotions inspire poetry
Work creates it

However, do we need emotion to inspire poetry? Of course we don't. We can sit down with a clear goal in mind - like writing a poem about the apple's journey from blossom to pie and then just let our imagination work for us. It is a challenge and it gets us in the habit of writing for a reader. This leads me to the next point.

Language
What is language? Well, mine is Danish and English on here. But my language is also academic when I'm at university and lyrical when I'm writing poetry - perhaps even adjectival - and it can be derogatory when I'm angry. Language is a fluctuating entity that can take all sorts of shapes, and when writing poetry we make it take the shape we want it to - or at least that's what we *should* be doing. When writing poetry there is often a tendency to just let language flow because it feels right. But whether or not you're writing with rhymes, rhythm, messages or emotion it is your language that will take your poem from you to your reader. This makes language the only thing that is absolutely necessary for a poem.

And now you're thinking "Well, duh, you can't write without using your language" and no, indeed you cannot. But while we do use our language whenever we write something no matter the quality, this is not what I mean by putting your language to use. See, your *language* is what makes a text a poem. Your language and the way you choose your words is what makes a collection of images or emotions something that the reader will want to read and understand.

Everyone has emotions and I'm positive no one is interested in knowing what everyone feels at any given point in time. That's why we use our language to make the emotions interesting and worth reading about.
Everyone has experiences that they can tell a story about. But it is how they tell the story that makes it worth listening to.

So what makes a poem?
My conclusion must be that the only thing that truly makes a poem is the language. It is all in the telling. Whether it is an emotion, an experience or a message you want to share it is the langauge with which you share it that makes it poetry. Whether you choose to write rhymed verse or free verse, whether you choose to write Miltonic epics or Elizabethan sonnets it is the language that makes it worth the reader's while.

Let this be food for thought for all you poets out there. And let this thread be open for discussion of my above points as well as questions for clarification.

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In future instalments I shall cover:
Meter (iambic, trochaeic, spondaeic, etc)
Form (sestina, ballad, villanelle, etc)
Rhymes and Alliterations
How to edit your poetry
How to find inspiration

If you have wishes and ideas for other topics I might cover please let me know through PM

[Taika of Narfell]

Billy said:

It is an interesting question to ask. What is poetry indeed? The poems that I consider truly great are the ones that have evoked an emotional response in me of some kind. I may not understand the poem, like Coleridge's Kublah Khan, but that doesn't stop the poem making me feel something. In the case of Kublah Khan, I am well aware that it is the language that affects me.

A poem is a piece of art and like all art it should have an emotional effect on the reader in order to be considered successful or a 'good piece of poetry'.

So since the tools poets have to work with are words, I would have to agree that it is the language that is the most important aspect of a poem. A poem uses as few words as possible to say something big. Rather than wordy explanations describing whole setting/atmosphere, a poet will use similes and metaphors, along with other poetic devices such as alliteration and onomatopoeia to create the 'feel'. And it is this 'feel' that makes the reader respond emotionally, even without really understanding why.

The kind of emotion that is important to a poem is the type that is conveyed, not the type that is put into the poem. Many great poets wrote truly emotional pieces, however they were cold writing them because they constantly editted their work in order to make it the best it could be. It is better to sit down and think of the effect you want your poem to have and then set about achieving it then to sit and pour your heart into your poetry. Of course writing poems from the heart is good for one's emotional well-being, but it is not always good for the poem. To be honest I think the best poem I wrote was one that I wrote in a cold and calculated way. It is also the only one I ever editted, surprise surprise.

Great topic Jem. You know how much I love to discuss this stuff.

[Taika of Narfell]

Well, I disagree with you about the effect. A poem doesn't necessarily have to have an emotional effect on the reader. Check my third sonnet. There is no actual emotion in it, nor should there be an outright emotional response in the reader. It is more of a poem that makes you think - in fact that sonnet says exactly what I think a poem should be. It is a meeting of two minds - the writer and the reader.

The writer is trying to convey something, be it an emotion or a message. There are no absolutes in poetry - sadly, it'd make a lot of things a whole lot easier - there is only the transition between writer and reader.

A poem is never just what the writer wants it to be, because a poem changes the moment someone reads it. That's what all art is, basically, the process that happens between artist and audience. That process is so variable that the same process will never happen twice. It will change with each new reader and each new poem - and even each reader's new mood.

Seeing that it is all about the exchange, you are absolutely spot on when you say: "The kind of emotion that is important to a poem is the type that is conveyed, not the type that is put into the poem." As long as the poem is on paper in the writer's desk drawer it may well be about the latter, but the moment the writer hands that paper over to another for to read, it becomes irrelevant and the former takes precedence. From the moment there is a reader for a poem it is the reader's emotions that defines the emotion of the poem and not the writer. And that's the transition - the meeting of minds I'm talking about in my sonnet.

I'll post more instalments at a later date. And I'll cover as many subjects as I can think of. This was mainly intended as an intro to make people think about what poetry actually is. 'Cause poetry is most certainly not defined by lumping an emotional rant down on paper/screen and chop the lines up to make it look like poetry. That is merely a chopped-up emotional rant. Poetry takes work. Poetry takes conscious effort to say to a reader what you want to say. Anyone who claims that they write their best poetry in sudden bursts of emotion and then never look at it again are delusional. People may well be inspired by (or in) sudden bursts of emotion - goodness knows I am at times - but emotion does not become poetry without some work put into it.

I cannot emphasize enough the two short lines I used up above.

Emotions inspire poetry
Work creates it

That is the harsh truth of it. If emotions create poetry then everyone out there who is feeling something is also a poet. But no, wait, they're not. The poets are those who work hard to bring their intentions to the readers, be they to make the readers feel something, see something, think about something or understand something.

I'm glad you liked the column. I'm hoping this will spark some interest in actual poetry and improvement rather than emotional rants.[/url]