Craft

Appalachian Writer said:

And there are tools. Poets should read poets, should understand meter, should be able to employ poetic device, should consider line breaks as important as the words. Poets should KNOW words; they should be able to express sentiment without using overt sentimentality. I could go on, but my fingers are tired.

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but it's important to remember that none of what you (correctly) point out above relies on formalism.

in fact, to deny a poem can be so without formal structure is to ridiculously assume that poetry burst into existence fully-formed, already with structure. surely this is not the case. surely, poetry existed as a very separate thing from prose (indeed from conversation) prior to being formalized.

this were times of a mostly illiterate populace that depended on memorizing verse to retain it or perhaps having it read aloud to them, both of which were enhanced by predictable rhythm and meter.

in the age of near global literacy, in the age of the printed page, poetry can do more. it can play with the eye as much as the ear.

furthermore, as with the visual arts, as with music, as with theater, convention is made less important by accessibility in our age. poetry is no longer only about exalting god or exalting heroes or exalting love (though it can certainly be so), it's about anything and everything.

with this freedom comes the freedom (and rightly so in my opinion) to break the walls imposed by history.

remember that with any formal school came a history whose shackles the young turks cast off. they were all revolutionary and without the sentimentality many of us now harbor for them.

What a sophism. memorize this skivaskiv swivslivswig svinswig abnaganabagamba verses this hello my name is bob, I live in a big tree. Clearly the second is far easier. if a poem is 4 words, maybe you don't need metre, but if a poem is long, how is the reader supposed to remember what goes on at the beginning? how can memory retain the development. You have all the freedom in the world to write without form, and your readers the right not to read you.
Patterns help our mind develop the ideas, and retain the value. Take for instance 100 notes of music, randomly generated, what sort of music is that? Why bother listening to such noise. Now take 100 randomly generated words. What sort of poem is that.

yes, there's absolutely no middle ground between formalism and randomly-generated words...

Formalism is different than writing with structure. Formalism implies a form, such as Sonnet, whereas all poetry has a structure, some structures just happen to be better than others.

Until the mid-20th Century, the purpose of Poetry was perceived as communication of all forms of experience, be it physical/personal, intellectual, emotional, or observed in such a manner as to convey MEANING and INSIGHT into human nature and the world around us from ALL possible perspectives in as CLEAR and CONCISE a manner as possible using elements of craftsmanship based on Purpose, Continuity, and Cohesiveness of Images and Thought, organized in a structure that was Unified and Complete.

This is the structural foundation for all Classical/Traditional Poetry and is just as acceptable for working with "Free Verse" as for working with any established "Form" because "Free Verse", as I've stated before, is simply another "Form" and the differences between "Traditional" and "Modern" Poetry lie, not in the "Forms" they use, but in the differences between their Philosophies, because "Modern Poets" have rejected structure and form and the communication of meaning and insight and concentrated on intense depiction of personal experience as seen through complex associations of intense images and sophisticated wordplay, which I call "Experiencial Imagism", and which has, in the opinion of many, alienated them from common reader and established an in-bred elite that treats poetry as a competive occupation and set itself apart from the classic role of Poetry in society, thus isolating them from the general public, and this has been exerbated by the fact that the proponents of this philosophy control the Universities, the Publications and the Contests that are the interface between Poets and the Public, which makes it difficult if not impossible for any alternative forms to find an audiance.

The results of this isolationship has lead to the concept, even within the "Modern" poetic community, (which is generally associated with "Academics"), that "Poetry" as a force in our culture has, in fact, died. It hasn't, and lives in Song Lyrics, Greeting Card Verse, Poetry Raves and Forums like these, (although most of these never rise above being Verse)

As I've attempted to explain several times before, 'Modern Formalism" is not a return to "Traditional" Forms and Values, it is an attempt to disquise "Modern" Principles and Philosophies by arbitarily cloaking them within accepted Formal structures but without accepting "Traditional" Values.

I've been accused of being a "Formalist" and highly prejudiced in favor of such. I am NOT. What I am is a proponent of "the Principles of Craftsmanship' developed out of and still identified with Classical/Traditional Poetry, and the Forms they developed and utilized are secondary to their Principles, although I don't seem to be able to make some people understand that distinction.

The bottom line is that Poetry is based on Communication of Meaning and Insight and it requires a unified coherant Structure in order to do it, and Obscurity, whatever arguments are used to defend it, is the refuge of incompetance.

Think About It.

James R. Hoye, (JRH)

Appalachian Writer said:

A few weeks ago, I was asked to judge a chapbook contest, partly because I enjoy a little recognition locally and partly because it's hard as hell to get someone to judge these things. I just finished going through the stack of pocketfolders that cradled the entries.

YUK! After I finished, I almost wanted to cry. Most of the "poets" who entered this contest knew nothing about the craft. I'm a great proponent of free verse, but I found very few entrants who knew anything about meter (a requirement, I would think, for all poetry). More than half had compiled a long list of love poems, mostly ranting about betrayal, with very few that went beyond that standard "he left me and I'm really pissed off." Please, please comfort me with your understanding of what makes a good poem. What are the elements that compose well crafted work?

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Sewned 'em all a do-it-yourself goth kit. And don't forget the knives.

attn P.H.:
Any subject is ripe for exploration in a poem, no matter how everyday, ordinary, or personal so long as one or more of the many requisite, and often intangible, elements that make up a great poem are present. So just follow your own course and I'm sure you'll arrive at where you want to be in time
As to me, I think I'll bow out of this convo and pick up a book on poem composing, as suggested...

AW:

So many questions you ask; so little time have I to answer. Alas, the Ides of April loom large ahead, and my taxes (and my mother-in-law's) are not yet done. I've scanned the early posts in the thread, and want to respond, but only after reflection and deep thought. I don't know when that will come, given my current pressing responsibilities. I will chime in with my thoughts, however, be they late or not.

NDG

Who says poetry is only alive in song lyrics and the like. First of all, most of our perceptions are heavily ethnocentric, leaving out the poetry of many other countries who perhaps are having a growth in poetic writer because of increase in literacy. In addition to this, there are still many successful contemporary poets. How do you explain them. You toss the term Modern around where it should say contemporary, and you make no distinction between the modernist and post-modernist movements. Post-modern poetry is very different in philosophy and in form than modern poetry. Poetry readership may be down (I haven't seen the statistics) but that is no proof that the poetry is dead, or that it only exists in song lyrics and the like.

Songs were highly lyric based before (especially in the German Lieder tradition). How is that an argument for lyrics being poetry based? If anything they are less poetic now then they were before, unless you are counting the words to rap music, which I would argue, has also decayed severely.

Now, instead of fighting with all of you on this issue, let me ask a better question, one that perhaps may enlighten this thread: How many of you guys go out and buy new poetry anthologies. How many of you go and get poetry periodicals, or any poetry books written in the passed 50 years. The truth is, that even if you did, because of new communications, it would be impossible to know every poet now. That is why we must look for the poets with the most memorable lines. That is why structure is essential to poetic creation.

By the way, ever thought that it was just reading that was down (which I have argued before) and not poetry. Maybe it is just that people are too busy ranting about their lives, or going about trying to get ahead of the game, or are just living in a virtual world where everything is viewed from behind a screen. Maybe it is just that people no longer reading.

A few weeks ago, I was asked to judge a chapbook contest, partly because I enjoy a little recognition locally and partly because it's hard as hell to get someone to judge these things. I just finished going through the stack of pocketfolders that cradled the entries.

YUK! After I finished, I almost wanted to cry. Most of the "poets" who entered this contest knew nothing about the craft....

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AW:

Okay, after saying I wouldn't get to this for a while, I decided to use my lunch hour to do this instead of planned things. The wind at 30 mph and the threatening rain are excellent excuses to not take my noon walk.

Concerning the quality of the poems submitted to the contest, I would like to know to whom the contest was opened. The general public who might have seen a contest notice? High school students? University students? Members of a local poetry society? That's important to know, because for each group we would expect a different aggregate quality of the entries. If entrants are people who responded to a notice posted in the library and in a newspaper, we would expect pretty poor quality. If these are English majors in college, we would expect something better. Since these are chapbooks and not individual poems, that tells me the entrants are more serious poets than the population at large, in which case the lack of quality is more disturbing.

We tend to think that there is more dreck being passed off as poetry today than at times past in history. I wonder, however, if that is true. Dissemination is so easy today, due to technological advances not available to poets in a ruder era, that more people see the dreck. But maybe, as a percentage of all poetry written in any given era, we have no more today than in eras past. Mercifully only the best of those eras survive; we don't see the dreck that was written simultaneously as Keats' odes, or Shakespeare's sonnets, or Chaucer's epochs.

This might not be true when one factors in the expansion of literacy, as Haskins said. More literate people, as a percentage of the population, might indeed produce a higher percentage of crap than did a people in the past. Either way, sponsor a chapbook contest in 1800, and I'll bet you'd get plenty of chapbooks at which you'd want to gag. Again, all those chapbooks were destroyed by knowledgeable heirs who found them tucked away in chests and realized the judges were correct in writing on it, "Foresooth, these stinketh."

Other parts of your post will have to wait for a later time.

Best Regards,
NDG
P.S. I guess there's something to be said for lack of notoriety; no one is asking for me to judge anything. May it ever be so.

* opens arms to give Appalachian a hug, but is rebuffed *

AW: Here's the next installment in my response to your original post.

More than half had compiled a long list of love poems, mostly ranting about betrayal, with very few that went beyond that standard "he left me and I'm really pissed off."

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Yes, the rotten angst poems of youth. That’s rotten poems about angst, not poems about rotten angst. These become tiring after a while. You read one; comment on it; have the young ranter get upset; write them off as a not-serious poet; and move on. Then the next one comes along, and it seems like they haven’t read any of the previous angst poems or the critiques thereon. I have some thoughts on this, thoughts that have developed into a theory that helps me from going ape when encountering a rotten angst poem.

1. Young poets lack things experienced poets have, the most important of which, IMHO, is perspective. We who have lived five and a half decades have three and a half decades more perspective on life than does a 20 year old. We look back on the many years of working for a living, dealing with big problems of life (like death and taxes), and the angst of teenage years, which sometimes bleeds over into young adult years, seems like unimportant memories that now provide good laughs. Once they grow up fully they will gain perspective, and find other things to write about.

2. Young poets, on average, lack experience in poetry that old codgers do. This, however, is not always determinative. An old codger like me, who shunned poetry for three of his adult decades, could easily have less experience writing poetry than a much younger poet. But, in general, if a poet is dedicated to improvement, and never stops learning, time yields experience, and experience will be huge in moving beyond rotten angst poems, hopefully at least to good angst poems, full of craft.

3. Another thing I see is the inability of some people to separate the importance of the message from the quality of the poem, this trait being more prevalent in youth. “I’m hurt—he (or she) hurt me, and they’re gonna pay in this poem!” Or, “I’m so sad that Janie (or Johnny) dumped me and is now with that idiot.” This is an important message that the world needs to hear (so thinks the poet), and the poet cannot see how it is important to communicate an important message with a huge dose of craft. This also seems to be true of political poetry, which is mostly poorly done, in an angst sort of way, with the poet seemingly more intent on getting the point across than writing an excellent poem. Politics and angst: what strange companions.

Years of dedication to being a better poet with give perspective and experience, which will help the poet find a broad range of subjects to write about, yet when a strong message poem must be written, can be done with much craft in a way that may just convince someone of the correctness of the poet’s message.

At least, we can hope so.

These aren't even young poets. These are college students. I'm a young poet, and I have never written a depressing she dumped me poem. Keats was 26 when he died, remember that.

JBI said:

These aren't even young poets. These are college students. I'm a young poet, and I have never written a depressing she dumped me poem. Keats was 26 when he died, remember that.

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Congratulations, JBI, for being one of the unusual ones. I hope that results in an excellent career for you.

College students are young, very young. The maturing process is far from complete at that age.

Keats' age has nothing to do with anything I said, except to say he was the genius exception to the rule. Any rule has an exception. No doubt Shakespeare was ahead of others his age. Probably the best in each generation was ahead of others at an early age. Who knows what Keats might have produced had he not died young of his chronic illness.

I stand by everything I said.

I find it rather ironic, it being that most major poets started off writing when they were young. Prufrock hit the markets when Eliot was 24 I believe. It is not that the poets are young, it is that they are bad. They all just happen to be sending their mediocre work to the same spot. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of older poets who are just as bad, but instead of writing about how much their life sucks, write about a bunch of sentimental rubbish.

example of poetry with substance:

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep--
He hath awakened from the dream of life--
"Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings.-We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

Percy Bysshe Shelley / Adonais / An elegy on the death of Keats / : (

Improving my craft is a big reason I post poems here for crit. (The other reason is the feeling of community -- here, writing poetry isn't seen as weird.) So this question on what we think of as craft got me thinking -- what exactly am I trying to learn?

To say more with less words. This isn't a goal for all poets, but it is with me. People here have noticed this obsession and been wonderfully helpful in pruning verbiage.
To make words sing. This is meter and rhythm and all those wonderful things which lead me to sit and mutter words, trying to hear where the accent lies. I'm very bad at this and am still looking for a "Accents for Dummies" book, a cheat sheet would be nice
To remember that poetry is communication. I'm including this in craft only because it's a choice I've come to make in my style and choice of subjects. Sometimes poetry is primarily for the originating poet; there is something that just has to be expressed -- but it is not to be shared. I'm trying clumsily to say that I feel uncomfortable reading poems which have little meaning beyond the poet, and I'm trying to correct this in my own work.

Ok, I'm sure there's tons of other stuff, but these are my starting point for craft. Oh, and choosing titles that intrigue and contribute to the poem.

Book on poem composing:
Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, Paul Fussell, 1965
(listed in back of a poetry anthology. planing to pick it up myself, maybe.)

Legend! Thank you

On the other hand, Stephen Fry's Ode Less Travelled is gorgeous. I've borrowed it from the library, but maybe owning it and using it as a textbook would work best. So I checked out prices from an Australian bookseller. Would you believe, an electronic copy is $5 dearer than a paper one?!!