Why Poetry Is Way More Punk Than You Thought

WHY POETRY IS WAY MORE PUNK THAN YOU THOUGHT

Karissa, Clemens Mill & Hespeler |May 7, 2015

You know it, I know it: poetry doesn’t have the best reputation these days. Very few people think “poetry” and “cool” are correlating concepts. Maybe it’s because we’re so used to prose fiction, maybe it seems too intimidating at first glance, or maybe it’s because in school we’re always studying the complicated likes of good old Shakespeare.

But poetryiscool (and so is Shakespeare, by the way. I mean he invented the word “bedazzled.” That’s pretty badass). Poetry written by classics like Shakespeare, Keats, and Browning is cool because it’s beautiful and strangely relevant, even decades later. The contemporary poetry written byBilly Collins,Allen Ginsberg, andHeather Christle, however, is cool because it’s making a difference now. It is condensed, powerful, and it makes usfeelin a way prose never could. Poetry shows us a raw glimpse inside the mind of the writer. It challenges the norm, and it gets people angry and surprised. Poetry is kind of punk, if you ask me.

But how does one start reading poetry? Reading poetry is definitely a skill that needs to be developed. There are conventions to learn and patterns to notice; you need imagination and patience and insight and guts. But boy is it worth it.

Here are some fun and unexpected ways to start reading (and loving) poetry:

• Grab a novel in verse.These books have been popping up all over the place lately, but especially in the YA section. And they’regood. Typically 150-300 pages long, these novels tell a story entirely in free verse. They’re packed with powerful emotions, strong metaphors, and vivid imagery. TryAudacious(a paranormal twist on high school drama),Rumble(about the aftermath of a suicide),Sharp Teeth(a werewolf horror story) orThree Rivers Rising(a historical romance).
• Watch slam poetry.Spoken word is an amazing social movement that allows people to share important stories in bold, creative ways. Attendinglive performancesis always a worthwhile experience, but there are thousands ofamazing Slam Poetry performancesto watch on YouTube. Some of the most popular areShane Koyzcan,Sarah Kay, andCatalina Ferraro.
• Subscribe to online literary arts journals.This is a great way to discover up-and-coming poets. If you’re a poet yourself, you could even try submitting to one. Check outGigantic Sequins,The AWL(which is free!),The Rumpus, orMcSweeney’s Poetry Series.
• Read contemporary poetry on a topic you care about.
• Do you believe that people should be doing more for the environment? Try reading environmental activist poets likeRebecca FoustandRobert Hass.
• Are you super into feminism? TryDorothy Parker,Mary Angelou,Margaret Atwood, orPatricia Lockwood.
• Do you like stories about romance? Well you’re in luck, because so do poetsMarie Howe,Clifton Gachagua, andeecummings.
• Science Fiction Poetry?! Who knew that was even a thing. But it rules. TryHarry Martinson,Jeffery McDaniel,J.E. Stanley, andRussell Jones.
• Want to read about what it means to be human? Just about any poem will do, butBilly Collins,Gwendolyn Brooks, andCristin O’KeefeAptowiczare definitely good ones to start with.
• Interested in poetry written by other young people? TryErika Meitner,Wendy Chen,orLizzie Harris.

Trust me, there is a poem about anything you could ever want to read. Browse the themes section ofpoets.orgfor more ideas, or ask a librarian to help you find some.

But beware. Reading poetry might make you think about things you’ve never considered, learn about things you never imagined, and view the world in a whole new light. And you might even enjoy it.

What Is Poetry?

by Dan Rifenburgh, for the National Endowment for the Arts

I.

We may feel we know what a thing is, but have trouble defining it. That holds as true for poetry as it does for, say, love or electricity. The American poet Emily Dickinson, though shrinking from offering a definition of poetry, once confided in a letter, "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." A well-known British poet, A.E. Housman, could identify poetry through a similar response. He said that he had to keep a close watch over his thoughts when he was shaving in the morning, for if a line of poetry strayed into his memory, a shiver raced down his spine and his skin would bristle so that his razor ceased to act. What is this thing that can so physically affect some persons?

One poet called a poem "a thought, caught in the act of dawning." Another said a poem is a means of bringing the wind in the grasses into the house. Yet another stated, even more enigmatically: "Poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the brush." It is just like poets, of course, to talk this way:poetically. It often seems they refrain from saying a thing straight if they can give it a little twist. Such tendencies make you want to lay hands on a good dictionary, where the facts are. The trouble with this approach is, most dictionary definitions of poetry are so dry, limiting, vague, or otherwise unsatisfactory, they eventually send you back to beating the bushes for that elusive, beautiful pheasant you once glimpsed. It's certainly not there in the dictionary. Even so, it is possible to describe the general elements of poetry and to at least indicate the power, range, and magic of this ancient, ever-renewing art form.

Like other forms of literature, poetry may seek to tell a story, enact a drama, convey ideas, offer vivid, unique description or express our inward spiritual, emotional, or psychological states. Yet, poetry pays particularly close attention to words themselves: their sounds, textures, patterns, and meanings. It takes special pleasure in focusing on the verbal music inherent in language.

When we hear a poem, we may recognize certain patterns, such as a regular beat, a rising rhythm, or a series of rhymes. When we see a poem printed on a page, we might notice another kind of pattern that cues us we are not looking at standard prose: those ragged right-hand margins, indicating the lines must stop there and nowhere else. Whether we hear a poem read aloud or read it on a page, it ought to be clear we are experiencing a specialpatterned arrangement of language, differing from ordinary speech or prose writing.

This formal patterning, considered aside, for a moment, from poetry's higher aims or its subject matter, has long been one of the chief identifying hallmarks of poetry. Roughly speaking, the devices by which poets achieve these patterned arrangements of language are called the elements of verse. The word "verse" comes to us from the Latinversus, a "turning," and denotes the turning from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, as for us today, the line was the basic unit of poetry, just as the sentence is the basic unit of prose. Greek and Roman lines were regular in their structure and could be classified and analyzed according to their component elements, the poetic feet in each line, which gives the line's meter. Over time, verse has come to mean poetic composition in regular meter, or metrical composition. Here is an example of English poetry written in a regular meter:

Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

To a person acquainted with verse, the predominant meter here will be readily seen asiambic pentameter, the standard meter of English literary poetry. An iamb is a metrical foot consisting of two syllables. The first syllable is unstressed and the second syllable receives a stress, as in "ta-DA." There are five of these feet in each line, which is why it is called "pentameter."

Below are two of these lines divided by stroke marks into their component metrical feet (iambs) and the stressed syllable in each foot is capitalized:

Each CHANG/ing PLACE/ with THAT/ which GOES/ beFORE
In SE/quent TOIL/ all FOR/wards DO/ conTEND.

Not every line of the four lines first quoted above is a perfect iambic pentameter line. Good poets change their meters occasionally to provide variety or for other reasons, but since the predominant meter is iambic pentameter, we can say that is the meter of the poem. Having established the meter, we may also note the end words of each line rhyme in an alternating scheme we can denote as "A-B-A-B." Those end words are "shore," "end," "before" and "contend." So, we have an example here of rhymed iambic pentameter, a charming snippet of metrical verse from the pen of William Shakespeare.

Verse is poetic composition in regular meter, whether rhymed or not. (If unrhymed, it is called blank verse, as in Milton's Paradise Lost or Shakespeare's dramatic verse.) The exception to this is free verse, which abandons metrical regularity altogether. Yet it, too, "turns" on the basic unit of the line and may rightfully be called verse. The long, rolling, repetitive lines of American poet Walt Whitman and the passionate Hebrew psalms found in the Holy Bible are well-known older examples of free verse. Free verse has grown in popularity since the early twentieth century and has now pretty well "swept the field," as poet Stanley Kunitz observed. The majority of poets today choose to work in free verse, though there are many fine poets still working in meter.

Having loosely established what verse is, it should now be emphasized that verse is not what we mean by the word "poetry." Devices such as rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, meter, and regular line length are elements of verse which aid poets in producing patterned arrangements of language called "poems," yet, supplemental to these, certain qualities of imagination, of emotion, and of language itself must be added before we can properly call a piece of writing by the name of "poetry." Poetry is considered a higher thing than mere verse, and for good reasons. This is an important point, to which we'll want shortly to return, but let's consider verse and its patternings a little farther.

It is surprising to some people to learn that more than ninety percent of the poems in any standard anthology of English poetry are written in formally structured, highly patterned metrical verse. Similarly high percentages would obtain for anthologies of the poetry of most other languages, including Greek, German, French, Latin, Russian and Spanish. Why?

Formal patterns seem to help preserve and hold the ideas, emotional power, and verbal energy of poetry as a bottle holds wine. Devices such as repetition, alliteration, rhythm, rhyme, and meter also greatly aid the human mind in memorizing poetry. This was vital to poetry's existence before the invention of writing. Homer's vast epics, theIliadand theOdyssey, were oral compositions committed to and transmitted by human memory before they were eventually written down. Much of early Greek poetry was transmitted by rhapsodes, or human reciters. The same was true of the lengthy historical narratives composed and memorized by the bards of Ireland and Wales, who were the official repositories of their peoples' histories. This same phenomenon appears in cultures all around the globe.

There is a very old saying, "Art is long; life is short." Poetic art has a better chance of becoming long-lasting art when it takes advantage of the devices of verse which serve to pattern language. One American poet once said that a poem is "a time machine" made out of words, by means of which people in the past may speak to us and we may speak to people in the past, present, and future. It is a famous conceit of poets that they have the ability to "immortalize" in verse their lovers, for instance. Consider this concluding couplet from one of Shakespeare's sonnets:

So long as men can breath or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The urge to defeat death and escape the ravages of time is a basic motive underlying the creation of all art. If one wishes to fashion immortal verse, to construct, as it were, "a time machine," one would want one's words to bememorable, and that is part of the job description of the several devices of verse: to aid in giving a poemmemorability.

Sooner or later it dawns on most poets that, happily, they have entered a vast, ongoing, and varied conversation that spans the centuries. Through their acts of creative composition they can join the great poet John Donne in saying, "Death, be not proud." Every poet has at least the hope that his or her work will survive an individual life's span, and art is one of the few tools we have to kick a little sand in the eye of the Grim Reaper. Notice that in this particular bid for eternal fame, Shakespeare chose a rhymed iambic pentameter couplet to preserve his living words. Patterned arrangements of language gain inmemorabilityand offer a leg up in the quest for that immortality poetic art seeks for itself.

II.

Aside from the charm, musicality, and memorability verse lends to poetry, we expect great poetry to display qualities of invention and imagination. The word "poet" means, in Greek, "maker." To the early Greeks the poet was a creator with singular gifts of inspiration, invention, and composition. The poet invented fables, fictions, myths, and stories that conveyed deep truths about the world and human life. This ability of the poet to create something new and interesting was remarked upon by Shakespeare inA Midsummer Night's Dream:

The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The form of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

Of course, the poet doesn't create out of "nothing" and make a world out of whole cloth. His compositions, to have any meaning, must have some relation to the world of human beings and to nature. Given that relation, however, the poet enjoys a great deal of creative freedom. As Sir Phillip Sydney wrote in "An Apology For Poetry,"

Only the poet . . . lifted up with the vigor of his own invention . . . goeth
hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her
gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit.

The English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge considered the faculty of imagination to be a repetition in our finite minds of the immeasurable creativity within the imagination of the infinite "I Am," or, God. If poets are human exemplars of this divine creative quality, it is little wonder the philosopher Plato stated, "A poet is a light and winged thing, and holy." One such poet was the American poet Emily Dickinson. A recluse in life, she found an immortal voice in short, powerful verses, such as her 1862 poem, "This Is My Letter to the World":

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me--
The simple News that Nature told--
With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see--
For love of Her--Sweet--countrymen
Judge tenderly--of Me

While many great poets such as Dickinson best express themselves in brief lyrical works, others give us more fully sustained displays of the power of invention: the Italian Dante Alligheri takes us on an incredible tour of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise in his Divine Comedy; John Milton gives us the rebellious angel Lucifer fighting eternal war against God, with all humanity as both prize and witness, inParadise Lost; Homer tells of the long homeward journey of a veteran after the Trojan War inThe Odyssey, with fascinating episodes of shipwreck, survival, and suspense, building to the final homecoming of Ulysses to his wife and child on the island kingdom of Ithaca, where one final battle awaits him.

We may note that these stories, legends, and fictions are never told in sweeping, hollow generalities, but the poet always hones in on specific, tactile details, pungent with sensuous imagery, all of which paint startlingly realistic portraits through the use of vivid, accurate language.

Along with making use of lively detail, the ability of the poet to notice correspondences, similarities, and analogies and to employ these in constructing fresh and original metaphors lies at the heart of great poetry, and is part of its imaginative sweep. The often sensuous, figurative language of simile and metaphor seems to appeal greatly to the human mind. Consider the opening stanza and fifth stanza of "First Snow in Alsace," by World War II veteran and Pulitzer Prize winnerRichard Wilbur:

The snow came down last night like moths
Burned on the moon; it fell till dawn
Covered the town with simple cloths.
* * *
You think: beyond the town a mile
Or two, this snowfall fills the eyes
Of soldiers dead a little while.

Here the magical beauty of the first snow is described against the backdrop of war, a contrast made more powerful by the simile comparing of falling snowflakes to dead moths. (Wilbur reads this poem on theOperation Homecoming CD.)