TheBig3

So you're saying that poetry is intentionally misleading? That it can't come right out and say something. And if it were to, its prose? So is this not a poem...

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.

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I've moved to a new address

VEGANGELICA

EDIT: Oops! I posted this before I read your previous post.

Poetry is not intentionally misleading. Instead, poetry requires the reader to use her imagination and her own creativity to understand the essence of the poem. I don't intentionally make poems vague, but instead I sometimes use metaphors that feel more to me like the subject than simply describing it matter-of-factly.

The plum poem *is* a poem according to my definition of poetry, which included this description: "Sometimes poems encourage audience participation by only describing one aspect of some subject, such that you have to imagine the rest."

For example, the poem about plums is not ACTUALLY about plums at all. It is about love of self and other, and the conflict between the two, and the feeling of needing to ask forgiveness of those we love when we know our self-interested choices hurt them. That is my interpretation, at least. So, missing from the poem is the actual subject of the poem. It symbolizes something deeper, and the reader has to identify the deeper message.

I brought up rhyming indirectly when I wrote, "Sometimes poems encourage audience participation by...emphasizing the feel of the words themselves (the rhythm, the meter) to cause the readers to appreciate the sound of the words, which can add to the meaning. Words in poems can be used like brush strokes in a painting. Again, these poetic elements require the readers to involve themselves more deeply and imaginatively with the words to extract meaning."

I didn't mention rhyming since it is one of many poetic techniques that cause the reader to appreciate the song-like qualities of poetry. By song-like I mean the words have a pattern and feeling to them. Rhyming words are like brush strokes that go in the same direction in a painting, or they are like the use of the same color in several parts of a painting to give it a feeling of cohesion.

Poetry makes me feel less alone than prose because the poet is trying to communicate the essence of something to me so that it grips my psyche in a personal way more than prose usually does.

I like poetry because it expresses the "human condition" and everyone can be a poet. I would be disappointed in poetry if only certain people could be considered poets. I definitely feel every person is/can be a poet, though some people may feel more moved to record their experience of living through words. I feel that categorizing people's written expressions as "poetry" or "not poetry" using a simple definition of poetry puts inappropriate limits on what is considered poetry. There may be poems you like more than others, but that doesn't mean the poetry you dislike isn't still poetry.

I call myself a poet because I've felt that way since I was 12 and first wrote haiku after reading old Chinese and Japanese haiku. I felt a strong connection to words, meanings, thoughts/feelings and the imaginative playing with those words to represent the writer's reality.

It sounds like you are saying what I argued much earlier in this thread: defining poetry limits people's ability to see and appreciate the variety of poetic expression methods that people use.

I basically agree with your definition of poetry above, except that some poems are pretty damn long (pages and pages) and some poems are probably simply playing with words/sounds rather than trying to refine some concept or experience down to its essence.

I don't expect poems to provide THE truth, but instead the truth as the writer views or feels it at that time. It sounds like you simply don't like poems about people's wounded feelings. Just because you find that subject trivial, overdone, or gushy doesn't mean the writings on that subject aren't poetry, I feel.

I do my best to feel every emotion I have about something! I sometimes write things that I feel are terrible writing as I write them...but when I've felt torn apart over someone and write about it, the poem at the moment usually feels very close to how I really feel, and I am not judging it harshly. I usually like it because the act of writing helps me process my feelngs and thoughts. At the time, it feels very right. Later, the poem amuses me. For example, I remember after the break-up of one college 2-year relationship, I wrote a poem that makes me cringe now because I dislike the neediness it shows and the triteness of the descriptions I used. Here's an excerpt:

So, when I read people writing similar stuff on MusicBanter, I sympathize with them. I know where they've been. I think their writing is sweet because it is how so many people feel during a break-up. Novel poetry? Probably not. But very human.

I disagree that one's proximity to emotion (when writing about it) clouds an essance of truth. But that's also because what is truth (in our perceptions) isn't just one thing. Someone (A) who is in love, for example, may view a person in a very different fashion than someone (B) who is not in love with that person. If both persons A and B write about the subject, the poems will probably be very different, but will both describe a valid truth.

I agree that SOME poetry can sting and is raw because it is the naked reality, but it sounds like you are constraining your definition of poetry based on subject matter. Some poetry does not sting at all. Some is gentle, caressing, commiserating, welcoming. Some is wistful, regretful, loving, resigned.

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bungalow

just to clarify, where exactly are you drawing a distinction or disagreeing with what erica has said? the whole disagreement seems pretty manufactured to give you a platform for your self-absorbed, reactionary musings on poetry. your attempt to position your stance as the result of "a more disciplined search" is ridiculously condescending (in the sense that it is both ridiculous and condescending). who here, beside you, had even offered a coherent estimation of poetry for you to position yourself against? what is the 'itness' of poetry that this board maintains? again, you rightly predicted the obvious objection to your entire point when you said, "for this reason mostly, I don't try and put my finger on what something is." you define poetry too narrowly, with a self-absorbed focus on your own half-baked poetic theorizing that leaves room for multiple contradictions, and then, when the contradictions are pointed out you try and situate them as differences of opinion rather than a flaw in your definition. and i think that is the essential problem with (and genesis of) this debate--it isn't just that i feel poetry can occasionally be comforting, angsty, sentimental (or rhymed)--it's that it can be and occasionally is all of those things and you have chosen exclude this poetry from your true, "disciplined" () definition as the worthless contrivances of love-hurt teenagers--as though poetry cannot be worthless or written by love-hurt teenagers, it is the domain solely of canonized poets.

maybe you're just unaware that there is good poetry and there is bad poetry, and these determinations are mostly left to subjective value judgments, but it is all poetry and your estimation of what constitutes good poetry is distinct from what constitutes poetry.