A Pointless Question with a Point: Request For Criticism

[koshersalaami]

Almost a week ago, I posted a poem called Pointless. It went like this:

I

suppose that

I

could attempt

to

write poetry

but

the fact remains

that

I don't have the beginnings

of

a clue as to

what

I'm doing.

Then there were a couple of pictures. The pictures were just there to be cryptic; I grabbed my phone and took a pair of odd pictures around my house. I'm more interested in the text.

Let's say I had written it this way:


I suppose

that I could attempt

to write poetry

but the fact remains

that I don't have the beginnings

of a clue

as to what I'm doing.


I considered making the fourth line "but the sad fact remains".

The thing is, this post, while fundamentally silly, is actually dead serious.

On what basis would anyone who either writes poetry or knows anything about writing poetry make such a decision?

I could do it a third way:

I suppose that

I could attempt to

write poetry but

the fact remains that

I don't have the beginnings of

a clue as to what

I'm doing.

I'm not trying to be a poet. I am, however, trying to understand what I'm reading and, currently, I don't.

I'm not looking for an answer like "You just do it whatever way you want." I'm looking for Why anyone would make a decision or series of decisions. If the answer is "you just do it whatever way you want," I could:

I suppose that I could attempt to write poetry but the

fact remains that I don't

have the beginnings of a

clue as to what I'm doing.

which I chose because it seemed to have the least logic to it.

Or I could pick a song melody and try to match the words to the song's rhythm. Possibilities come to mind, none of which exactly fit. At the moment, I'm thinking about Satisfaction ("that I don't, that I don't, that I don't, that I don't     Have the beGIN NINGS    da da dahhhhhhh   of a CLUE UE   da da daaaah da daa daa). You get the idea.

This is, to me, mysterious. I seek enlightenment.

[Jonathan Wolfman]

All I can offer is that when I'm editing I often try to hear the rythms in my sentences, and I write, of course, prose essays.

[koshersalaami]

Thanks, Jon. I write prose that way, leaving all sorts of spaces for emphasis rather than write in paragraph form. The trouble is that I don't know from poetry. Is it really all, as one of my previous commenters referred to it as, "American Crap Verse?" I don't mean mine; I know mine's crap. It's kind of supposed to be. I mean everyone else's.

[JMac1949 Memories]

Poetry is a mystery... most people who try to write poetry fail miserably.  I'm convinced that poetry that works for me is an arrangement of language that evokes something that is either so familiar to me that I have experienced it or something that I never imagined possible... everything else is either craft, pretense, platitude or all of the above.  The problem for poets is that to succeed once, they must fail ten, a hundred or a thousand times.

[koshersalaami]

Sure, but I don't understand the craft. Aside from rhyming stuff, the only thing I ever wrote that anyone ever told me was any good, and it was sort of half intended as poetry in the first place, is the closing from my original post about my son's death. I described his driving his power wheelchair toward the Ark at services, and the literal matched up perfectly with the metaphorical. In other words, I got lucky. I knew I liked it and I wasn't exactly preoccupied with craft at the time.

I don't get the decisions about form. I don't get the mechanics. Is everyone just pulling it randomly out of their asses?

I mean, do I just write a bunch of sentences, break them up funny, and call it Poetry?

[Phyllis]

I've been writing random poetry most of my life but I know nothing about form or meter, I just write because I like how it sounds. Have you looked at Dorian Grey on Open? He has a textbook knowledge of all of that. But, if I were to start trying to figure out the mechanics, I would find a Poetry for Dummies book and start reading. Your method, though, asking the people here, will get some more interesting answers. 

[James Mark Emmerling]

Kosh, the obvious thing to do is go to the so-called great poets and see what they have to say.

I will get you started.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

 

A poem is a naked person . . . some people say that I am a poet.

• Bob Dylan

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

• T. S. Eliot,

• Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836), 
• Language is fossil poetry.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson

A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

• Robert Frost,

 

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

• Allen Ginsberg

Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

• Thomas Gray

A poem should not mean But be.

• Archibald MacLeish

 

 

 

 

 

 

[koshersalaami]

Poetry For Dummies? Yeah, that's exactly what I need. Phyllis, let me know if it exists.

James,
I get what poetry is.

Here's the thing:

I'm a musician. Not professionally, but I play a lot of instruments and I've played an unusual number of genres. In some of these I've had some real instruction. People will tell you that musicians play with soul because it's inside them. The truth: Yes and no. There are techniques you can learn to make music expressive. They won't make you expressive, but you get more expressive if you understand the language better, and that's the way music works. I'm looking for something analogous in poetry.

[Phyllis]

They have one of those books for pretty much every topic. I've never read them, though. I just find the whole genre interesting.

Poetry for Dummies

[Just Thinking...]

I've often wondered the same thing.

No clue over here either, but I like how your mind works  : )

[nerd cred]

I'm contributing this because I keep thinking about it lately.  In high school we were assigned to write some kind of formal poem; I don't remember just what - a sonnet, an ode? No memory.  But this is what the smartest girl in school wrote, one of the few poems I've ever memorized:

Ish pish

Percy Bysshe

She got the only A in the class. In the top 2 or 3 classes, actually. Better than all of us who worked our asses off on the assignment. Maybe there's an English major out there who knows what the form is.

Kosh, books, schmooks. It's modern times and Google is your friend, not just your ruler: what is poetry?    how to write poetry

Taking it to music: yesterday I had some email conversations with my violinist daughter about what to listen to - I've been doing a brain killing data entry job that has the advantage of leaving me room and lots of time to listen to music (until my eardrums throb - damn you earbuds) and I've been doing some comparisons. Found that on the Sibelius concerto I didn't at all like the performance of a violinist I normally like a lot. Daughter said this about it: Hilary Hahn is so impeccable in her technique--it's her downfall sometimes. She just can't pull off the Russian concertos--she can't let it rip. But her Bach is masterful.  (Aside: Monday I'll be listening to Hahn's Tchaikovsky.)

So maybe read a lot of what you like and then improvise from your heart? Let it rip? Rather than worrying too much about technique?