What is Poetry?

[New]

What is poetry? Who knows? I know a lot of people care. I haven't cared until recently, until the idea was brought to my attention by several people I respect. Here's my thoughts on it.

First of all, poetry isn't prose. What is prose, then? I ask myself, for one cannot exclude something from a group unless one defines a group. Here's my definitionrose is thought expressed. Sure there's emotion, sure there's life, there can even be emotion. But it's just raw thought. Nothing to make it cool. It's the writer saying, "Here's what I think, fucking deal with it!!"

Poetry, however, is something more intricate. Poetry is what make the sleepless rest. Poetry is a form of art that makes the offensive palatable to the untrained mind. It's like the salad dressing on the tomato(I HATE tomatoes). It's like the artist taking the random paints of life and connotation and re-weaving them. Poetry, simply put, is thought filtered.

Filtered through what, you may ask? How can something as raw as someone's emotions laid out for the world to critique be filtered if it is to be respected at all? Quite easily, if I may be so brash. For, you see, poetry if for those thoughts that can't be expressed without having a Ph. D in philosophy, or a degree in law that's 40 years old. It's for purity that doesn't have proper words. For you see, poetry is base.

Base, in the sense that it shouldn't have a higher purpose. Poetry is for the writer's emotions to be seen and heard. Poetry isn't for higher thought, thoughts that can be analyzed and destroyed, for poetry is nothing more than the product of it's parts - it can't be broken into further pieces and "grokked", if I may borrow a term. A poem torn apart is just pretty flowers is isolated from the patch it was grown in.

I guess to summarize, the difference in poetry and prose is intent. Prose is meant to inform, while poetry is meant to enrich. Analyzing information is intended and even encouraged, while analyzing intent beyond its purpose cheapens and dulls it's impact.

Analyze and disagree with it. It's prose, after all.

 

[Jabberwocky]

Poetry was invented for men to get laid. and women to fool themselves into sleeping with less than desirable men.

I know you wanted to foster discussion and im only being silly.

here is i think a really excellent explanation for it:

What is poetry? A short piece of imaginative writing, of a personal nature and laid out in lines is the usual answer. Will that do?

Poetry definitions are difficult, as is aesthetics generally. What is distinctive and important tends to evade the qualified language in which we attempt to cover all considerations. Perhaps we could say that poetry was a responsible attempt to understand the world in human terms through literary composition.

The terms beg many questions, of course, but poetry today is commonly an amalgam of three distinct viewpoints. Traditionalist argue that a poem is an expression of a vision that is rendered in a form intelligible and pleasurable to others and so likely to arouse kindred emotions. For Modernists, a poem is an autonomous object that may or may not represent the real world but is created in language made distinctive by its complex web of references. Postmodernists look on on poems as collages of current idioms that are intriguing but self-contained — they employ, challenge and/or mock preconceptions, but refer to nothing beyond themselves.

Discussion
What distinguishes poetry from other literary compositions? Nothing, says a vociferous body of opinion: they are all texts, to be understood by the same techniques as a philosophic treatise or tabloid newspaper. But that makes sense only to readers of advanced magazines, for poetry does indeed seem different. Even if we accept that poetry can be verse or prose — verse simply having a strong metrical element — poetry is surely distinguished by moving us deeply. In fact, for all but Postmodernists, it is an art form, and must therefore do what all art does — represent something of the world, express or evoke emotion, please us by its form, and stand on its own as something autonomous and self-defining.

No doubt more could be said, but the starting poet may be feeling impatient. Theorists, like clever lawyers, can prove anything, and it is all too easy for an atrocious piece of writing to be defended by irrefutable standards. Are there not more practical ways of assessing poetry?

One point worth making is that aesthetics, together with theories of poetics and literary criticism, does not operate in a vacuum, but within a community of shared approaches and understandings. Typically, they are academia-based, and so written for fellow academics and their captive students. Their insights are important, indeed indispensable, for countering the half-truths that float around the poetry world, and for insisting that poetry maintain some depth and substance, but the young poet may wish initially to sidestep these abstruse matters and join another community, that of poetry itself. Poetry also has its beliefs and patterns of excellence. Its insights have to be acquired by participation: by writing and having that writing evaluated by fellow poets, by being able to appreciate a wide range of work, and by acquiring the crafts of literary composition.

None of that is easily accomplished, given the pressures of everyday life. Nor is there wide agreement on what sort of apprenticeship should be served. Schools of poetry are often hostile to, if not contemptuous of, other movements, and what is prized in one may be anathema to another. The beginning poet should read widely, join many groups, take any criticism seriously, but perhaps remember these points:

Suggestions
1. Poetry may well be the art of the unsayable. A good poem lies somewhere beyond mere words: it is the intangible, an exultation in things vaguely apprehended, something which emerges out of its own form, and which cannot exist without that form. Any poem that can be completely understood or paraphrased is not a poem, therefore, but simply versified or emotive prose (though not the worse for that).

2. Poems are an act of discovery, and require immense effort — to write and to be understood. The argument against popular amateur poetry is not that it uses out-of-date forms (there is no authority here, and art is always an mixture of elements coming in and going out of fashion) but that popular poetry finds its conceptions too readily. Contrary to contemporary dogma, poetry doesn't have to be challenging, but it does have to explore the nature and geography of the human condition.

3. A poem is something unique to its author, but is also created in the common currency of its period: style, preoccupations, shared beliefs. You may therefore grow out of the habit of writing Elizabethan sonnets, if indeed you ever write them, not by colleagues telling you that the style is passé but by understanding the limits of that Elizabethan world. You will probably write yourself through many enthusiasms and styles. And because your experience of the world will be shaped by your literary efforts, your conceptions of poetry will change as you develop a voice commensurate with your vision.

4. Poems are not created by recipe, or by pouring content into a currently acceptable mould. Shape and content interact, in the final product and throughout the creation process, so that the poems will be continually asking what you are writing and why. The answers you give yourself will be illustrating your conceptions of poetry. Once again, those conception will develop, eventually to include experiences more viscerally part of you, since poems are not a painless juggling with words.

5. Many poets have theorized on the nature of their craft. Their aphorisms are very quotable, and often provide entry into new realms of thought, but they should be used with caution. Artists are notoriously partisan, and rarely paint the whole picture. To understand their pronouncements, you need first to love their work, be steeped in its vision, and then to measure their pronouncements against the larger conception of art that other work provides.

 

[New]

I find your post quite fascinating. Much less partisan than my rant. It's really an interesting look at the whole thing.

 

[9mmCensor]

Poetry sucks for the most part.

Don't just think I am hating, I actually just don't like most of it, I just prefer a story in a different narrative form. but i do appreciate something being poetic.

 

[wastedwalrus]

Hahaha... something tells me Wordy and I contributed to the motivation behind this thread. I have so much to say about this but I'll leave it until tomorrow... it will be long.

 

[Rated E]

Poetry is like a discman in a world full of iPods. Or a cassette player. I'm not quite sure about that one. I must ponder some more *strokes chin*

 

[Jamshyd]

Almost every "important" (to western academia, at least) thinker in history have written on the subject, from Aristotle to Kant to Adorno.

No one seems to agree on an aswer yet. Hahaha.

I cannot tell you what poetry is, but I can tell you that I personally consider any coherent arrangement of symbolsims that lends itself to interpretation to be poetry.

 

[UnSquare]

Smode

Poe reacted
true some swing

Pen
usually

Cuttin' win

Head Spin Spit Blood Bring

Bury my wall

Urinate all
ALL
Ova that stall

No Shit,
I'm pickin' up
a Paulie
Mall,
Smoke itm
another Empa
Sea,
May I Fall...
?
Pass The Gate That I Saw,
wish I was fit,
drawl,
draw
L
-ick that cig,
so it hol's
together -
nuttin' pleasure -
sticks fo' it's character measure,
plant found
as treasure,
so much leisure -
Rich or Poor...
Hear someone talk,
they bore ya,
what do you do -
bro -
ya take a draw.

 

[UnSquare]

Way Doethn't Rhythm With Way. Curdle.

^
Not That...
Pardon.

In the French way.

I hope I get a 'pass' -
I've drunk alot,
an' Miss UAN
might be able to shift
my UnPoe.

Et. Al.

LOVE
Me.

 

[alasdairm]

poets know it



alasdair

 

[(Wordy)]

How to define something which itself is an act of (re-)definition?

Some quotes:

“There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.”
- John Cage

“To define what a poem is would require defining human existence. It would require answering why is there something, rather than nothing.”
- Charles Simic

"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does."
- Allen Ginsberg

"If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger."
- Muriel Rukeyser

I'll be back to discuss in more detail when I have time...

 

[wastedwalrus]

You didn't quote Coleridge!!!!!!!!! Heresy!

You'll be back to fix that, godammit. Hahaha.

I really can't express myself on this issue because my views are far too extensive. I'd have to write an essay.

 

[cantwinfortryin]

making copies late at night...
can sometimes set you feeling uptight...
so before the day is done...
try to have a little fun...
rest your butt cheeks on the glass...
and photocopy your own ass...

by me...

 

[echo off]

this is
fuck doubt.

 

[wastedwalrus]

making copies late at night...
can sometimes set you feeling uptight...
so before the day is done...
try to have a little fun...
rest your butt cheeks on the glass...
and photocopy your own ass...

by me...

Okay, seriously... what are you trying to accomplish in Words? I get it... make a complete mockery of everyone in here and all their works. Nice... very mature. Go back to Basic Drugs.

 

[doofqueen]

Poetry to me is words that move in a harmonious flow while expressing ones thoughts - is that too vauge? (even for me? )