Hectic Poetics: A Blurb About Reading Poetry

Erase the idea that poetry is gentle and kind. Or that the soft iambic beat will always make you weep…none of that crap. [Analysis of last line: “Or THAT…you WEEP”: iambic foot, “NONE of”: trochaic foot, “THAT CRAP”: spondaic foot]  

But maybe I should start by saying that I write this post to those that don’t come into constant contact with poetry—and I write as a student re­newed to the art form. Nothing’s polished, nothing’s the word of God.

But, “Yes, be like God.” (--Jack Spicer from “Imaginary Elegies IV”)

            Dickinson was a pro at compression. Is it silence, reticence, or suppression behind those dashes? And Poe wrote “The Raven” completely in trochaic meter. That’s why we feel the weighted lull. Was there a Barney-Stinson-“Challenge-Accepted!”, arrogant motivation behind it or was it his way into the sonic portrayal of the dead-weight of depression?

            But those are the revered masters of old. I want to bring up modern poetry, where language we hear every day becomes a soundboard of idiomatic, pun-ic, or otherwise clever wordplay. Rhyme is not always at the end of the line (and not even always similar sounds! This blog title is an example of a sight rhyme), sound patterns exist beyond rhyme, line cuts afresh, meter is mixed in mad, mad squalls, and all and all…

          Digression: To answer the question, can’t you just stress any word the way you want? Simple answer: no. A word is never alone; it must be read in context to determine its metrical identity, but interestingly, some words actually tend to be stressed always. “All” is such a word. Consider the phrase “And all that jazz.” It’s “and ALL that JAZZ” since you’d be forcing it too much to say “AND all THAT jazz,” know what I mean?

          Now the line: how is poetry and prose distinguished? A quick and dirty answer is the line. Yes, there are prose poems, but that form is itself a deviation from the poetry’s formal structure in having lines. All poetry carries patterns of some sort, whether in the repetition of the “r” sound in every line to a more obvious one like iambic tetrameter. But the line matters. The left and right margins help splice meanings, making the sentence and the line different or similar entities.

          Example: here is an unbroken phrase: “under the surge of the blue mottled clouds”. It’s nice but the two adjectives “blue” and “mottled” seem clunky, not smooth.

          Now here is the phrase put back in its context of William Carlos Williams’ “Spring and All”:

                                             “under the surge of the blue

                                               mottled clouds”                      (lines 2-3 of the poem)

The word “blue” now rings with ambiguity, making us see it as a noun [technically, a metonymy standing in for “sea”; metonymy: the attribute “blue” stands for its object “sea”] and then once we get to the next line, we see it as an adjective for “clouds”. The line separation makes the meaning of the phrase less clear intentionally. Maybe the first line should be read independently of the second line? It can be, since no interpretation is the absolute truth in art, but we generally wouldn’t since the next line fits so well into the meaning of the phrase overall. Still, the enjambment—the line break after “blue”—lets in a moment of semantic intensity.

         I originally wrote this blog entry two months ago but never finished it—it’s spring break and what the hell, so here is a blogged blurb about reading poetry. And the thing about poetry is innovation of form. Say “I love you” without saying it in words—use the form. Or obscure horizons of meaning like this:

and all the knights were blue

skies naked of silver

and all the night skirts blew

silver naked of skies

Poetry should still make sense grammatically, which is the key part to writing it. Not all sentences will be entirely complete or entirely correct grammatically but they will make sense and follow grammatical patterns. The cheeky example above may not have capital letters to begin but there is still syntax, still structure. The anaphora (the repetition of "and" in the beginning of the lines) structures the way lines one and three work to distinguish the separation of the first two lines from the latter two. There is also the play with homonyms (blue-blew and knight-night) and “silver” as a metonymy for swords (4th line) and for stars (2nd line). Yes, I just wrote that example because you know what, it doesn’t matter how bad a poem is so long as you read and write poetry to mess with form and take it for a walk without the stroller. In art, form drives meaning, form is meaning. The question “What does a poem mean?” need not apply—there is no meaning apart from form when it comes to art. Experience form unbounded from the cradle of conventional uses of language. And enjoy the ride.