What is poetry?
Ms. Haiku
Washington DC Posts: 7,265
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.
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.
There is no such thing as leftover pizza. There is now pizza and later pizza. - anonymous
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
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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?
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
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.
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.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
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.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
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).
"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.
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. . .
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
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.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
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.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Just a turn of phrase.
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.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
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.
When I think of sacrifice of artistic autonomy for overt political statement, I immediate cringe remembering poetry "slams" that I've been to.
Do tell. I love "bad poetry" anecdotes.
WAR!
Pain, death, groaning
bullets in the fucking chest
hacked limbs
blood
dead children
dead babies
dead mothers
AND THEY JUST PLAY FUCKING GOLF!
now repeat for 15 minutes
Although some of my favorite bad slam pieces revolve around Britney Spears
When I first started writing poetry, and I wasn't very good at it, I came up with one phrase, that I only began to register as something important later
the phrase was Infinity's Tresspassers
that became kind of my arch-type for my characters in many of my poems. Which is why so many revolve around single moments, breaking points, ordinary people put in extraordinary situations
it's more of an idea than an image really, just transience
I don't know if I have any real images that repeat constantly, although authors are sometimes the least likely to find those repeat images in their own work
I swear that was a thread on A Moving Train the other day.
If by the other day you mean everyday then yeah it may have been.
It's also known as dialogue at every college campus in the US
"Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry."
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it
-- Omar Khayyam
It's ironic that the poetry in that passage is created through the repetition of present participles.
Sounds good to me. But one could take an ostensibly prose form, which communicates meaning through the agreement of verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions and still, through the inclusion of assonance, alliteration, repetition and manipulation of rhythm, manage to convey an unspoken physical sensation that the words in themselves can't express in a syntactical, syntagmatic order. This prose would be poetic. Conversely, one could write a poem avoiding poeticisms such as rhyme or rhythm, almost embracing the most commonplace of language, but still create a striking work because of little anomalies in the text.
What does a poem need to be a poem, with its characteristic anomalies? Um, I think it needs tropes. Tropes facilitate metamorphosis: "reality" becoming magic or a truer reality beyond oppressive dominant epistemes. Poetry is inherently subversive. It needs ultimately to use tropes such as simile or metaphor or the hypnotic effect of repeated sound to transform our understanding of ourselves in society, whether we read the poem in its moment of production or three thousand years later: A good poem will be ambiguous enough in its use of tropes to construct a new way of beholding our "nature", physical or human, social or cultural, historical and psychological.