What is poetry?

Ms. Haiku

I thought of these this morning. I'm sure that I posted something similar to this a while ago, but here again:

Poetry is a straight line of thought that forces the reader to think

Poetry sends fire to the reader through imagery and language

What is poetry to you?

A lot of Neruda poetry has wheat in it, and I always think of good poetry as fire. Is there some image that always reminds you of poetry?

Also, is a good progression of a poet one who writes from 1st person then to third person and then back to first. Basicially the view of a growing poet, does it change like the view of a person as she ages. Or does growth stem from a "progigal son" mentality: she writes what she knows, then she tries a different writing style, she fails or succeeds, and then she returns to the subject matter she wrote about originally, but by the expansion of thinking what she knows is written differently.

FinsburyParkCarrots

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry

Ms. Haiku

I like that definition. Good job in finding it Fins. Ok, how do you consistently see poets progress in their work? Mary Oliver's work is very consistent throughout so I can't really say she's grown much as a poet. Pablo Neruda is the only other poet where I have enough of the volumes to see the style over time. He went from political to introspective. I thought writing in third person was the height of poetry, but his love sonnets are first person and they were written later than most of his political poetry. His later poetry focuses on his life as it is then.

Now, maybe the question is more, do publishers try to publish poets whose style they think has come full circle, and that they do not expect to change much - that would make sense from a financial perspective, eh?

FinsburyParkCarrots

Ms. Haiku wrote:

I like that definition. Good job in finding it Fins. Ok, how do you consistently see poets progress in their work? Mary Oliver's work is very consistent throughout so I can't really say she's grown much as a poet. Pablo Neruda is the only other poet where I have enough of the volumes to see the style over time. He went from political to introspective. I thought writing in third person was the height of poetry, but his love sonnets are first person and they were written later than most of his political poetry. His later poetry focuses on his life as it is then.

Now, maybe the question is more, do publishers try to publish poets whose style they think has come full circle, and that they do not expect to change much - that would make sense from a financial perspective, eh?

I'm not so much interested in poets as poems and how they engage with the conflicting ideologies of their period of composition and reception. I really dislike appraisal of any artist that considers their work as a separate canon in itself, as if someone creates work in a vacuum. I also dislike a lot of the best PJ album polls that we on this board see on The Porch, because they compare, say, Ten and Riot Act without thinking how Riot Act engages with the music and attitudes of its time.

No man is an island and all a poet can do is write something that engages interrogatively and radically with attitudes and ways of seeing the world, in a specific moment of production. If an artist settles too much into a mode of creating their own style of work they concentrate less on the work they make and more on their ego. Neruda stands up as a writer because he never stopped thinking about the ideological and historical implications of poetic form and voice. He wasn't thinking about writing to complete a canon of "Neruda".

I'm not saying that good art is necessarily politically committed, but it will register a kind of politics or historical awareness and won't be art for art's, or the artist's, sake. A love poem, using allegory and new form, can still have ideological ramifications beyond authorial intention. An example of a visual artist who got so preoccupied with himself that he stopped making culturally relevant art is Dali, from the 1940s onwards.

Ms. Haiku

Whenever I think of an artist who I respect for trying new ways of expression I think of U2. I don't have or even know some of their later work. When they tried different technologies or styles they were truly doing what artists should be doing. At the same time, the U2 sound is present as they are trying these electronic technologies or B.B. King blues sounds. I would like to recognize an artist in some way by his/her/their work - no matter how different the first piece of art is from the 50th, there has to be a definite "This is the inner core of me" present.

But as far as my original question, I think beginning poets focus a lot on "ME." They should. It's the most imporant and most interesting person to write about at that time. At a certain point, though, a story has to include more than "ME", and the poet has to think of himself/herself as the catalyst for the newest expression of a potentially common experience.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Homer didn't write about himself and he wrote the greatest poem ever.

Ms. Haiku

That probably wasn't his first poem, though, was it? I don't know. If it was then my theory is wrong. However, until proven wrong, I think poets, as any professional, grow with experience, and I wonder if there is a consistent growth in viewpoint.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Ms. Haiku wrote:

That probably wasn't his first poem, though, was it? I don't know. If it was then my theory is wrong. However, until proven wrong, I think poets, as any professional, grow with experience, and I wonder if there is a consistent growth in viewpoint.

We don't really know he existed. The oral poem of The Iliad, judging by the varying ages of certain metaphors or references to bronze or iron age life, took about 500 years to develop, whether or not anyone called Homer consolidated all the material at the end. All that matters is the poem, not the poet. If he'd sung about himself, his work probably wouldn't ever have been written down.

Ms. Haiku

So in that case does the poetry of a society change-which is the view of what you stated earlier. I still like to focus on the individuals. Oh well.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Ms. Haiku wrote:

So in that case does the poetry of a society change-which is the view of what you stated earlier. I still like to focus on the individuals. Oh well.

There might be a cultural difference. The infrastructure of English socio-politics and culture retains elements of Feudalism which focused on the concept of class and communal identity. America was arguably founded on the kind of individualism that grew from Renaissance humanism and bourgeois individuation through elevated monetary status: Identity formation was self-orientated and competitive. I think this distinction manifests itself as differences between characteristic themes of British and American poetry. But that's not to say that a lot of American poetry isn't historically and socially aware (after all, TS Eliot was American, and also, much Beat poetry by Ginsberg or Corso is overtly aware of its radical potentiality in postwar conservative America), or that British poetry can't be personal or confessional (see Elizabeth Jennings' poetry).

FinsburyParkCarrots

Ms. Haiku wrote:

So in that case does the poetry of a society change-which is the view of what you stated earlier. I still like to focus on the individuals. Oh well.

"The personal is the political": First-person, "personal" poetry can be politically salient, depending on whether your construction or interrogation of self reaffirms or challenges dominant concepts of psychology, social status, gender, sexuality, class or race.

Ms. Haiku

Beat poetry is a big slab of blah blah - it all sounds the same except the first paragraph of Howl by Allen Ginsberg. Beat poetry actually proves your point more than mine, because it was based on a single mindset; or rather it was marketed as a single mindset similar to the whole grunge thing.

About the best poets, they are political, but they have grown with individual voices. I like poets who have won the Nobel Prize, and they do speak on behalf of where they are from. Neruda's different in the images. He speaks successfully from many points and he does bring his community into much of his poetry even the poetry that are love notes to his wife. For him to be so prolific is astounding, and how he writes just floors me. Maybe this thread is really about how I like Neruda poetry

So, maybe the first few words of Howl is how the best poets view the world:

I saw the best minds of my generation. . .

FinsburyParkCarrots

A lot of Beat poetry is shit, I'll grant you. But it did have an iconoclastic cultural effect in the fifties, precisely because it's a lot of blah blah rather than the measured contrivance of a Robert Frost.

As for Nobel writers, I don't think any writer really writes where they're from. They construct a version of where they're from. Yeats's Ireland didn't ever exist: it was a dream of a declasse Dublin protestant living and writing mostly in London to please a protestant Anglo Irish ascendancy that hoped to take power from the British, come a revolution. Tagore's Bengal was of a Zamindar family business dynasty with ambiguous notions of the people, community and the role of nationalism in anti-imperialist resistance.

Ms. Haiku

So, Yeat's if what he wrote about didn't exist, yet he had fire within, where did he get it from?

FinsburyParkCarrots

Ms. Haiku wrote:

So, Yeat's if what he wrote about didn't exist, yet he had fire within, where did he get it from?

My answer would have to be, he was the product of his ambiguous class standing. His father's people were declasse, descended from the aristocratic Butler family but fallen into genteel poverty; John Butler Yeats, WBY's father, was a struggling artist (not a respectable or lucrative job in Dublin in the latter half of the nineteenth century). From his father, WBY gained his longing for a more opulent and resplendent past. WBY was always a little embarrassed that his mother came from the more practical, middle-class and business-minded Pollexfens, a rich family who set up a small commercial empire in Sligo. Yeats's personal background is of relevance because it reflects the uncertain nature of Protestant identity and community in nineteenth century ireland. Protestants had the run of the best education and jobs but Yeats was too poor to afford these privileges. He synthesised in his mind a peasant idyll of a romantic Ireland, identifying somewhat with its Otherness but violently rejecting what he saw as its Catholic narrowness. Yeats's imagined Ireland - central to his artistic vision - is the result of his social being (which must be assessed in historicist rather than psychoanalytic or simply biographical terms, to understand what produced his "fire"). He was an aesthete and prelapsarian nostalgiac, by his social design. Sorry if my view of Yeats's inspiration isn't as romantic or metaphysical as his own.

Ms. Haiku

No need to apologize, sounds good.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Ms. Haiku wrote:

No need to apologize, sounds good.

Just a turn of phrase.

EvilToasterElf

I don't think I've ever seen a poet, at least a modern poet carry the same style throughout a few volumes. Or even through the same collection in most cases.

Although if the focus is always inward there wouldn't be as much of an instinct to change the form, the subject matter would always have the same weight.

Poetry is an awareness of one's surroundings described and analyzed with language. I often think the poet and the comedian are two people with similar functions, both try to percieve the world and focus on different aspects, one tries to find humor and one beauty.

Ms. Haiku

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Just a turn of phrase.

If you don't mean "Tongue in Cheek", I'm lost. What?! What phrase turned - ohmygod my brain just kicked in to get kicked out by this post.

Ms. Haiku

EvilToasterElf wrote:

I don't think I've ever seen a poet, at least a modern poet carry the same style throughout a few volumes. Or even through the same collection in most cases.

Although if the focus is always inward there wouldn't be as much of an instinct to change the form, the subject matter would always have the same weight.

Poetry is an awareness of one's surroundings described and analyzed with language. I often think the poet and the comedian are two people with similar functions, both try to percieve the world and focus on different aspects, one tries to find humor and one beauty.

If you were to describe poetry in an image or include a certain consistent image in your poetry i.e., I think of poetry as fire, Neruda included wheat in a lot of his poetry, what would your image be?

FinsburyParkCarrots

EvilToasterElf wrote:

I don't think I've ever seen a poet, at least a modern poet carry the same style throughout a few volumes. Or even through the same collection in most cases.

Although if the focus is always inward there wouldn't be as much of an instinct to change the form, the subject matter would always have the same weight.

Poetry is an awareness of one's surroundings described and analyzed with language. I often think the poet and the comedian are two people with similar functions, both try to percieve the world and focus on different aspects, one tries to find humor and one beauty.

I think many politically committed Marxist poets might see the pursuit of beauty and an adherence to form as an ideological domination-effect, though the resistance to form can be to the detriment of the poem. A bad political poet would substitute rhetoric for artifice, whereas a good poet would try to fuse commitment with artistic form of some kind or another, maintaining a relative autonomy from both. I think of Christopher Cauldwell as a writer whose work, for me, eschews the pursuit of form too much in favour of overt political statement, whereas I think Brecht's poetry (at least in the translations I've read) strikes a more successful balance between commitment and artistic autonomy.