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But nobody asked "is this a poem"? Somebody asked "why is this a poem"? Very different question. This is the kind of misunderstanding that causes terrible trouble.
The Pound Maxim is one way of looking at it, although I would suggest that the key may be differential effect rather than simple condensation. Wordsworth's emotion recollected in calm is another decent one, and there's a whole lot of stuff about unheimlichheit that's worth thinking about. But, ultimately, you could argue forever about "is (x) a poem". I've seen poetry claimed for prose paragraphs, words interspersed with bongo solos, arrangements of blinking lights - more useful is the question, "what is the quality of 'poetry' adding to this?"
For example:
Understand the Dream
Soft music plays as I relax in a chair
I face the windows and into the night I stare
On the horizonI see a vision of you
You're surrounded by colours, bright red, deep blue
You're in my mind, but I want you to be
With me now, tonight, and to eternity
I feel your presence, I feel your smile
I feel you're with me, but all the while
I know I'm alone, but my feelings tied
My reasons to dream unjustified
I know I want you, but too scared to say
In case it's with another you wish to stay
Make my misery end and my dreaming real
To be mine again, say you will.
Now, you'd have to be very obdurate to say that this is not a poem (the usual accusation, that of versifying, is defeated by the absence of understanding of metre). However, if the poor fellow had just written the basic statement, "Will you go out with me again?" on a piece of paper, he would probably have done better out of the whole deal, and so would we. Because it is, alas, a very poor poem indeed. Had the author lived, he might have continued to write, found a voice and learned more about his strengths as a poet. But honestly? I doubt it.
Meanwhile, also poetic (and political) is this section from a longer poem, reimagining the Colombine shootings as two disturbed young menhanding out flowers to their schoolmates:
Experts are now trying to say how two apparently quiet kids
from an apple-pie town
could get their hands on a veritable rain-forest of plants
and bring down
a whole botanical digest of one species or another onto the heads
of classmates and teachers,
and where this fascination began, and why it should lead
to an outpouring of this nature.
And even though many believe that flowers should be kept
in expert hands
only, or left to specialists in the field such as florists,
the law of the land
dictates that God, guts and gardening made the country
what it is today
and for as long as the flower industry can see to it
things are staying that way
What they reckon is this: deny a person the right to carry
flowers of his own
and he's liable to wind up on the business end of a flower
somebody else has grown.
As for the two boys, it's back to the same old debate:
is it something in the mind
that growns from birth, like a seed, or is it society
makes a person so kind?
The rhythm here is pretty informal, the rhyme scheme is not afraid to spin off into haves (nature/teacher, say), and it gives a general impression that it could be represented as prose or just a conversationwithout too much trauma. So why is it a poem? Partly because, politically, it has to be. Partly because the author was being paid to write a poem. But there is a quantity of othering, of the unheimlich, that is reinforced by the chatty rhythm and the understated, enjambed but present rhyme.
Or, to look at it another way, the section:
The pages are paper razors.
You could slit your wrists from the paper-cuts.
has a similar intent to this short poem:
Early Spring cleaning, and the first
serious snow. Bedroom’s the worst; give an inch or ounce,
and lose an arm. Hence half an hour of motion,
tutting, fretting, marshalling and steeling
to plastic-wrap and chuck a decade’s clinker,
committed, ruthless. Back an hour later, you’d have seen
him, arse ungeared and reading over every letter ever.
That’s around the point the book’s discovered:
Pages still uncreased, unopened.
Perfect seal on something broken.
Time to give it back, not face to face, but hid,
brown-papered, covered, layered like an onion, thick enough
to save the postman’s fingers. Wrapping takes about as long
again as passed with steel and strop to lead
the taper of each page through razor, dagger, laser,
short shock and rebuke, the package’s own letter-opener
They're both lookign at the same idea, and using some of the same language, but in ver' different ways...
So, yeah, if you want to write poetry, and you can spare the time, then go for it, but that's not just the time it takes to write - it's the time it takes to *read* as well, which is maybe the most important and certainly the most time-consuming element. |
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I always like to get advice about things. Coincidentally I met with my poetry teacher an hour ago and she told me she liked my stuff a lot, that it was very strange but interesting. That boosted my ego a bit as she's had books of her own poetry published (mostly only in my area of the world though).