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Nov 29, 2009, 8:48am

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What is Poetry & How It Is An Artform
« Thread Started on Jun 21, 2004, 5:40pm »

1. Poetry may well be the art of the unsayable. A good poem lies somewhere beyond mere words: it is the intangible, an exultation in things vaguely apprehended, something which emerges out of its own form, and which cannot exist without that form. Any poem that can be completely understood or paraphrased is not a poem, therefore, but simply versified or emotive prose (though not the worse for that).

2. Poems are an act of discovery, and require immense effort, to write and to be understood. The argument against popular amateur poetry is not that it uses out-of-date forms (there is no authority here, and art is always an mixture of elements coming in and going out of fashion) but that popular poetry finds its conceptions too readily. Contrary to contemporary dogma, poetry doesn't have to be challenging, but it does have to explore the nature and geography of the human condition.

3. A poem is something unique to its author, but is also created in the common currency of its period: style, preoccupations, shared beliefs. You may therefore grow out of the habit of writing Elizabethan sonnets, if indeed you ever write them, not by colleagues telling you that the style is passé but by understanding the limits of that Elizabethan world. You will probably write yourself through many enthusiasms and styles. And because your experience of the world will be shaped by your literary efforts, your conceptions of poetry will change as you develop a voice commensurate with your vision.

4. Poems are not created by recipe, or by pouring content into a currently acceptable mould. Shape and content interact, in the final product and throughout the creation process, so that the poems will be continually asking what you are writing and why. The answers you give yourself will be illustrating your conceptions of poetry. Once again, those conception will develop, eventually to include experiences more viscerally part of you, since poems are not a painless juggling with words.

5. Many poets have theorized on the nature of their craft. Their aphorisms are very quotable, and often provide entry into new realms of thought, but they should be used with caution. Artists are notoriously partisan, and rarely paint the whole picture. To understand their pronouncements, you need first to love their work, be steeped in its vision, and then to measure their pronouncements against the larger conception of art that other work provides.

Some Points to Bear in Mind

Remember that:

1. Dedication to poetry is a vow of poverty. Scant reward comes in money or reputation. As in other arts, a more decent living is to be found on the periphery — in teaching, commentating on and/or performing poetry.

2. Poetry is a calling, not a career, and only adolescents strut around as wannabe poets.

3. Despite exhortation, hype and extensive funding, poetry is no longer the queen of the arts. It has minority status — worthy, but not courted by publishers or the media.

4. The rewards of poetry are those of a skilled craftsman in a difficult medium, one that gives great opportunities, and enormous pleasure when the work succeeds.

5. Poetry is still the workshop of language, and things can be explored in poetry that escape prose. Indeed, for all the current difficulties, poetry has the most innovative, exciting and significant of today's writing. To contribute here is to join a select community, and to enter into a kinship with the serious writers of the past.

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