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Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA
Oh all right, I'll be serious. It's true, though, that I really am working on a unicorn poem/song!
I feel poetry is using words to express or inspire feelings, thoughts, or insights by describing them loosely or unusually enough such that readers have to use their own creativity to fill in the gaps and understand the meaning.
Poetry is like a dot-to-dot. The words are the dots and the reader has to connect them to see the meaning of the poem and the poet's intentions. The dots are not all numbered, so the reader has to have an open mind and try to pick out a meaning. There may be a variety of interpretations possible.
Here's a poem I wrote a while ago (as part of a song) to describe my view of poetry:
Sometimes poems encourage audience participation by only describing one aspect of some subject, such that you have to imagine the rest, or by emphasizing the feel of the words themselves (the rhythm, the meter) to cause the readers to appreciate the sound of the words, which can add to the meaning. Short, clipped, harsh words may be used to describe anger, or soft, gentle words to describe peace. So, words in poems can be used like brush strokes in a painting. Again, these poetic elements require the readers to involve themselves more deeply and imaginatively with the words to extract meaning.
For example, if you notice, each stanza in the poem above is a haiku that can function separately. The poem itself is like a path in which you have to link these separate poems together to see that they are all about poetry. I tried to make the poem be like four separate leaves, guiding the reader on the mental path *I* take when thinking of poetry. Poetry makes me feel like I am a child again taking an autumn walk on a leaf-covered path and interacting with snapdragons I see growing alongside it. The stirred leaves on the path before me, the path itself, and the flowers someone planted (to be observed by another) are all part of what makes poetry drive away a feeling of existential loneliness. Poetry tells you that you are not alone.
Prose, in contrast, usually describes a scenario or thought more clearly and logically such that the reader moves sequentially and simply through the idea. The meaning of the prose is clearer, because the words' main function is to describe a thought as unequivocally as possible. If prose were a path, it would be one marked with a bright red line telling you exactly where to go.
For example, a newspaper article seeks to describe events so that readers can understand them concretely and easily without needing much outside knowledge or creative thinking.
Similarly, novels usually describe situations in concrete terms, though they may function on a poetic level when the reader has to seek a deeper meaning behind the surface descriptions.
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So you're saying that poetry is intentionally misleading? That it can't come right out and say something. And if it were to, its prose? So is this not a poem...
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I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
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And since you battled me to the death on rhyming, which I've not seen you bring up again, I'm wondering where you stand on that point, and again how that point would relate to this poem as an example.
Looking at waht you've written here I'd say you've combined techniques, the use of syllables and sounds(the scansion system in short), to create 1 half of poetry, and you've projected things onto the discipline. Can you tell me why poetry would, or why prose would not, make you feel less alone?
I'm hoping that out of this question we (everyone) can dig a little deeper into the meaning because I'm looking at the responses and they seem superficial. We could, with some of these definitions, apply nearly anything to anything here. Not to go off on a wild tangent, but whats so great about poetry if everyones considering themselves a poet?
Do we get a tax break for being a poet? Are we given exclusive membership to any club for calling ourselves a poet? No. So I'd ask myself why anyone would. Its jsut a guess, but since all teens and the youthful 20's find everyone idealizing the wild rebellion of the 1960's, and "poetry" as big then with the Ginsbergs and the Burroughs and the Kerouac, I can only guess its a desire to be tied to that culture. But of course, it isn't.
We find ourselves in 2010, with people all over using the word "poetry" to mean something other than what it is. And we project onto it everything we believe a poet and poetry is. Some people back in 1960 used the medium of poetry to deliver a message from a culture we wish we were. But nothing about it has to do with the medium or the art. If the Beat Generation can be cited for anything, its deconstructing what the art was. Since you asked I guess I should answer....
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What do *you* feel constitutes poetry?
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I don't make it my business to regularly perscribe characterisitcs to words and things. Any pretensious post-modernist will tell you that once you define a word, you define too what it is not. For this reason mostly, I don't try and put my finger on what something is. But you asked so...
I feel the art of poetry is to refine something down to its core, the essance of the thing you're looking to comunicate. maybe its a feeling, but it could just as easily be the absense of culture, or the degredation of time.
Whatever it is, its about the economical communication to describe that. Prose has the luxery of taking its time. Poetry comes to its point with only the necessary ingredients. Many poets are accused of looking for "the truth." That phrase carries too much weight for me, but you can see why they say that. You're looking for, as a poet, the radical root, the molecular level, that quintessence that encapsulates any one thing to a T.
And to drag that back to my title, when you see these songwriters claim themselves as "poets", they do so because they're talking about their feelings and how wounded they are. We call this in the greater scheme of things the empirical. Truth through emotion. But you don't have to live a long life to know that emotion does more to blind you to reason and truth than it would ever show you.
To make this a little more personal, I do my very best to be aemotional about the subject at hand. Its the only way I can say I'm being honest about something, but lets forget what I do, let me ask you...
You ever been broken up with and it killed you, and you tried to write about it and it just comes out as swears and "why's" and a bunch of terrible writing you know is terrible when you write it?
We've all been too close to a subject to be able to write about it. Its why when we edit our own work we put days between it. We don't look at it for awhile. I had a playwriting teacher once say to another student that they weren't allowed to write about a recent diagnosis because it was all therapy and no good writing.
Proxemity to emotion kills truth, it clouds core essance, and it makes unclear an honest response. Poetry takes awhile to master, not the art, but individual poems. You should come to it every day and say "yes, thats honestly what it is."At the very least your own.
Poetry is not the goodtime gang, it doesn't comfort you or dress your wounds. Its not chicken soup or that good person you come home to at the end of a long day. Leave that drivel to Hallmark. Poetry is raw, its direct, it should sting slightly when you think about it staring out the bus window. It is a naked reality we don't see constantly because its not easy to look at, or think about. If poetry is what this board maintains, the vague inanity that does little more than to rehash the same old generic wounds of growing up, then we've fooled ourselves and emotion has done more than cloud the truth for us, its clouded any chance or path we have to finding that truth.
You're all free to rhyme, and intentionally make vague your own writings, but I think, even if you come to the same conclusions, about what it is you believe about your writings and whether or not thats what poetry is. I feel like the most diciplined search will lead you to a different conclusion.
I sometimes write things that I feel are terrible writing as I write them...but when I've felt torn apart over someone and write about it, the poem at the moment usually feels very close to how I really feel, and I am not judging it harshly. I usually like it because the act of writing helps me process my feelngs and thoughts. At the time, it feels very right. Later, the poem amuses me. For example, I remember after the break-up of one college 2-year relationship, I wrote a poem that makes me cringe now because I dislike the neediness it shows and the triteness of the descriptions I used. Here's an excerpt:
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