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Fragmentary Ruminations on Poetry
What is poetry? On the most basic level, it is a distinct form of communication. How is it distinct?
Let us approach this linguistically. Western words for "poem" all converge to the Greek "poesis", meaning "create". So poetry has the connotation of being made up by man in contrast to being a simple mirroring of reality. In his Poetics, Aristotle refers to the creation of a separate world through poetry in which we can explore the spectrum of human experience and feeling. Certainly, there is truth in that. In Eastern cultures, words for poetry and literature often refer to a patterning of language. In his Analects, Confucius noted that words without patterning (literary value) do not go far.
From this very basic analysis of word histories, we arrive at two properties of poetry - patterning of words and the creation of separate worlds. I am not so naive as to believe these properties exhaust those of poetry, but they may serve as a proper starting point to answer the basic question.
What is the patterning of words? This is the formal aspect of poetry that distinguishes it from prose. It includes meter, rhyme, line breaks, syllabics, and rhetorical techniques like repetition, alliteration, assonance, etc. In all instances, the patterning makes the language of poetry unique or even strange. People do not speak "in poetry". Compare:
I ate a red apple yesterday. It tasted good.
to the following -
with line breaks
I ate a red
apple yesterday
it tasted
good
with meter
I ate an apple yesterday
It tasted good and it was red
with rhyme
The red apple I tasted yesterday,
It was good, I have to say...
with compression
red apple
yesterday
I ate
was good
with rhetoric
The apples that dangled on the trees
were like rubies on her face.
Yesterday I ate some before the race
and for miles the taste was a broiling sea.
So much for memories of the South
dried brown like apples in my mouth.
What does this patterning add? Is it simply decoration, or does it bring us somewhere else? Often the patterning makes the poem difficult or even impossible to understand. Consider
The desk was an ostrich
and my heart bled lions
her hands chased them away
for
I tried to be creative but I failed. I lost all my courage. But my girlfriend encouraged me so I continued.
What bout this famous poem by Sylvia Plath:
Ariel
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God's lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees! ---The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
******-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks ---
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else
Hauls me through air ---
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
White
Godiva, I unpeel ---
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
*********
Indeed, this poem describes a morning horse riding trip - which makes sense upon second reading.
The ambiguous can be deceptively straight forward. For example:
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
*****
Despite having been hammered into the psyche of American school children, this poem remains misunderstood by the majority. The instructors tell us it is about choosing one's own way - and yet it was meant to describe the aggravating futility of thinking on past decision, and how we can never go home again, to borrow Wolfe. Indeed, it is not a poem for young children.
Finally, consider this sonnet by Shakespeare
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
which is just
True love lasts a long time. If this is not true, then I was wrong and there is no such thing as love.
What makes a long-winded sonnet more compelling than a few straight forward sentences?
Perhaps one answer** lies in the second property of poetry - "the creation of worlds". For patterning does contribute another dimension of appreciation - a kind of aesthetic experience that is difficult to articulate. Soseki, the Japanese novelist and Haiku poet once wrote that the purpose of the artist is to recreate the aesthetic experience that once struck him as sublime. This is no easy task and may involve many artificial patternings. But if even one reader experiences a similar aesthetic moment, then the artist has succeeded. Perhaps there is something in that.
But these days, such questions become meaningless before absolute freedom in art. No longer bound by rules of patterning or world making - the poet has no guidelines and can only grope forward blindly among the fragments of tradition. Any psychologist knows that absolute freedom is more traumatizing to the psyche than any form of confinement.
In this modern world, I am considered naive for seeking the meaning of poetry. It is a dead matter.
**A more rational possibility involves a kind of riddle solving. Through the process of literary analysis, the mechanical underpinnings of a poem are revealed, leading to a series of general communications about the structure of the human experience. For example, in the sonnet mentioned above, the meter inadvertently strays from iambic pentameter during outbursts about love's fantastical qualities. It is as if these expressions are the products of pure emotional outbursts. Perhaps this implies love is beyond worldly reasoning. This is supported by the imagery, which focuses on some unmoving and unmeasurable quality within the very Italian nautical context. Moreover, this quality is reminiscent of the prime mover from Aristotle and the mystical properties in astrology. In this way, the poem goes beyond the treatment of love into the experience of faith within religion, philosophy, science, and the everyday.
 germanicus2 · Fri Apr 11, 2008 @ 12:47am · 2 Comments |
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