Originally Posted by TheBig3KilledMyRainDog

And since you battled me to the death on rhyming, which I've not seen you bring up again, I'm wondering where you stand on that point, and again how that point would relate to this poem as an example.

Looking at waht you've written here I'd say you've combined techniques, the use of syllables and sounds(the scansion system in short), to create 1 half of poetry, and you've projected things onto the discipline. Can you tell me why poetry would, or why prose would not, make you feel less alone?

I'm hoping that out of this question we (everyone) can dig a little deeper into the meaning because I'm looking at the responses and they seem superficial. We could, with some of these definitions, apply nearly anything to anything here. Not to go off on a wild tangent, but whats so great about poetry if everyones considering themselves a poet?

Do we get a tax break for being a poet? Are we given exclusive membership to any club for calling ourselves a poet? No. So I'd ask myself why anyone would. Its jsut a guess, but since all teens and the youthful 20's find everyone idealizing the wild rebellion of the 1960's, and "poetry" as big then with the Ginsbergs and the Burroughs and the Kerouac, I can only guess its a desire to be tied to that culture. But of course, it isn't.

We find ourselves in 2010, with people all over using the word "poetry" to mean something other than what it is. And we project onto it everything we believe a poet and poetry is. Some people back in 1960 used the medium of poetry to deliver a message from a culture we wish we were. But nothing about it has to do with the medium or the art. If the Beat Generation can be cited for anything, its deconstructing what the art was. Since you asked I guess I should answer....



I don't make it my business to regularly perscribe characterisitcs to words and things. Any pretensious post-modernist will tell you that once you define a word, you define too what it is not. For this reason mostly, I don't try and put my finger on what something is. But you asked so...

I feel the art of poetry is to refine something down to its core, the essance of the thing you're looking to comunicate. maybe its a feeling, but it could just as easily be the absense of culture, or the degredation of time.

Whatever it is, its about the economical communication to describe that. Prose has the luxery of taking its time. Poetry comes to its point with only the necessary ingredients. Many poets are accused of looking for "the truth." That phrase carries too much weight for me, but you can see why they say that. You're looking for, as a poet, the radical root, the molecular level, that quintessence that encapsulates any one thing to a T.

And to drag that back to my title, when you see these songwriters claim themselves as "poets", they do so because they're talking about their feelings and how wounded they are. We call this in the greater scheme of things the empirical. Truth through emotion. But you don't have to live a long life to know that emotion does more to blind you to reason and truth than it would ever show you.

To make this a little more personal, I do my very best to be aemotional about the subject at hand. Its the only way I can say I'm being honest about something, but lets forget what I do, let me ask you...

You ever been broken up with and it killed you, and you tried to write about it and it just comes out as swears and "why's" and a bunch of terrible writing you know is terrible when you write it?

We've all been too close to a subject to be able to write about it. Its why when we edit our own work we put days between it. We don't look at it for awhile. I had a playwriting teacher once say to another student that they weren't allowed to write about a recent diagnosis because it was all therapy and no good writing.

Proxemity to emotion kills truth, it clouds core essance, and it makes unclear an honest response. Poetry takes awhile to master, not the art, but individual poems. You should come to it every day and say "yes, thats honestly what it is."At the very least your own.

Poetry is not the goodtime gang, it doesn't comfort you or dress your wounds. Its not chicken soup or that good person you come home to at the end of a long day. Leave that drivel to Hallmark. Poetry is raw, its direct, it should sting slightly when you think about it staring out the bus window. It is a naked reality we don't see constantly because its not easy to look at, or think about. If poetry is what this board maintains, the vague inanity that does little more than to rehash the same old generic wounds of growing up, then we've fooled ourselves and emotion has done more than cloud the truth for us, its clouded any chance or path we have to finding that truth.

You're all free to rhyme, and intentionally make vague your own writings, but I think, even if you come to the same conclusions, about what it is you believe about your writings and whether or not thats what poetry is. I feel like the most diciplined search will lead you to a different conclusion.