Poetry

how does it work?

April is National Poetry Month, although I'm not entirely sure in which nation.

Regardless, I feel behooved to say something about poetry, starting with a definition:

Poetry is speech in which the rhythmical structure dominates the grammatical structure.

The genus of poetry is speech. Written words are not and cannot be poetry, except in the sense that a score is music. What's on the page is a plan for making the thing, not the ding an sich.

The differentia of poetry--the thing that distinguishes it from other modes of speech--is its rhythmical structure, which takes precedence over grammatical structure, including literal meaning. Here's a typical example from a goofy thing inspired by the the Doctor that Mrs Wonders and I did together many years ago, in which a young woman meets a mysterious traveler on a morse, which is a cross between a moose and horse:

She patted the morse with nerves all aflutter
her brain seemed to melt like summer in butter

Not remotely grammatical, but it gets the point across nicely.

There are plenty of things that are still art, but are not poetry. We need a richer language to distinguish these art forms, as we exist in a world where this one word is carrying far too much weight. Concrete poetry and a host of other modern linguistic experiments are worthy of their own names, but as it stands it's as if when photography was invented we collectively decided that there was no other possible word to use, and so we insisted on calling photographs "paintings". That's how silly calling most free verse "poetry" is: it has no particular rhythmical structure, so it is not poetry. But it still can be art, just as photography can be art even though it isn't painting.

At this point some people want to claim that such things are "really" poetry and argue for a more inclusive definition. That's fine, but then we need a separate word for "speech in which the rhythmical structure dominates the grammatical structure", which happens to describe almost everything that people called "poetry" up until a hundred years ago. While I think it's odd to not use the word "poetry" for that art, if we use "poetry" to mean something else, it remains the case rhythmical speech is an identifiable, useful, and interesting category of art that still requires its own term.

After all, no one wants anyone to confuse the sonorous beat of Tennyson or the muscular rhythms of rap with modern experiments in prose with funny line breaks, some of which are quite powerful.

"Formal poetry" is sometimes used for what I'm calling "poetry" but that's like using "manual painting" for paintings in a world where for some reason people decided to use "painting" in a way that included photographs.

Regardless of the language, speech in which the rhythmical structure dominates the grammatical structure continues to exist as a useful and interesting category of art, and no amount of nominalist game playing can change that.

Poems come in various forms and sizes. I've written long poems and maybe will have something to say about them in future, but here I'm going to focus on short poems.

Short-form poetry is the literature of small things: a moment in time, a single isolated idea or aspect of experience, a particular character. The combination of focus and rhythmical structure can insinuate an idea, experience, or moment into the mind of the listener, sneaking it past the usual gatekeepers by embedding it in a physical experience of speaking and listening that makes it engaging and recallable in a way that a purely descriptive account would not be.

Poetry up until a century ago is heavy with allusions based the expectation of a shared knowledge of (at least) the Bible and probably a good deal more.

My own poetry tends strongly toward naturalistic speech while still retaining a formal, metrical structure. This is a compromise I make with the modern world: I can't assume my readers or listeners are deeply familiar with classical literature, so I tend toward plain language and a relatively low level of allusions. I still steal from the Bible and Shakespeare and anyone else who has left their words lying around, from Homer to Herrick, but aim to make my work comprehensible and evocative regardless.

Even without a shared cultural bedrock, we still need a literature of moments that can capture the feeling of existing as a human being at a particular moment, in a particular state of mind, and put that into someone else's head.

At its best, the rhythmical structure of poetry acts as a brain hack: it allows ideas and impressions to infiltrate the consciousness of the hearer that would normally be filtered out by the censors of the mind. This is what makes poetry both powerful and dangerous.

Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If—”, for example, is an attempt to get his stoic, kind of brutal, Victorian values into people’s heads. Here’s my reply to it:

We have strong defences against other people inducing thoughts and feelings and states of mind in us, and the mechanics of the poetic machine are a powerful tool to get past them, to lull the defensive mind into a semi-hypnotic state of receptivity. The mind's limited capacity for attention is an important factor in the use of rhythm in poetry: rhythm catches the attention of our defenses while the words sneak past.

The fact that the reader or listener knows "this is a poem" is part of the mechanic: it warns the listener that the poet is up to something, and explicitly asks for their trust by admitting this. Then it tries to create in the listener a state of mind or emotion by pulling on various objectively real levers of influence. A poem is a machine for bringing about a particular psychological state in the listener. You can do a lot of damage with poetry if you aren't careful.

The voice doesn't have to be the poet's or even human, but the aim is still the same: to get the listener to experience being "here and now" for some value of "here and now". Like this, in the voice of a forest:

Step within my green enfolding arms
and listen to the beat of all the hearts
that dwell in my domain. The little birds:
the juncos, siskins, thrushes, flickers, more
than can be counted. A raven's call knocks hollow
through the trees while pileated heads
are hammered hard in search of errant bugs.

Perhaps a deer will pause and turn and look,
ears cocked to listen well as humans pass
along the path that runs from stream to sea,
from sandstone bluff to muddy flats below
where cougar footprints pace. Now look around
my vaulted halls wherein there lies a world
of lichens, mosses, ferns. A gentle breeze
reminds forgetful air to hurry on
its lonely errand to the patient sea.

I wait within.

The purpose of the poem is to take you off to the forest, to beguile you into a state of mind that would be otherwise unavailable, and would certainly not be created by the following prosaic description:

The rainforest is a habitat for many different species, including small birds such as juncos, pine siskins, varied thrushes, and northern flickers. The sounds of ravens croaking, and pileated woodpeckers hammering tree trunks in search of food, can often be heard. Larger animals inhabiting the forest include deer--which are often shy of humans--and cougars, whose presence may only be evidenced by footprints in muddy creek-beds, where a great deal of greenery is found, such as lichen, mosses, and ferns. The trees generally block any strong winds.

There's actually a bit more information in the prose paragraph than in the poem, but it isn't capable of evoking the same state of mind.

Rhythmicity is a rich and complex topic. It doesn't typically exist just at the lowest level of a poem's structure--the metrical foot--but potentially on all scales. For example, the pieces of a sonnet form structural blocks that are part of the rhythm of the poem. Consider this from Petrarch (my translation), lamenting the death of his love:

300. Quanta invidia io ti porto, avara terra

O what a grudge I bear you, stingy Earth,
for you embrace she whom I cannot see,
and best me for a glimpse of that sweet face
where I found peace long after all my wars.

O what a grudge I bear to Heaven, closed
and locked, so greedily entrapping her
sweet spirit, now set free from noble limbs.
Heaven won't for my sake change its mind.

O what a grudge I bear the lucky souls
who now enjoy her holy company
which I sought always with such ache and longing!

O what a grudge I bear to heartless Death
that having snuffed my life in her and dimmed
those eyes so beautiful, he lets me live.

I've ditched the traditional rhyme scheme but kept the 4/4/3/3 structure of lines, which can also be 4/4/6, 8/3/3, and so on: the Petrarchian sonnet is more flexible than the 4/4/4/2 structure of the Shakespearian. But in both cases the structure is part of the rhythm of the poem, low and rumbling, below the frequency of hearing, but still inherent in the experience. The repeated "O what I grudge I bear..." is also part of the poem's rhythm. In the original only the first word--"quanta", which means "how much", as in "How much do I envy the Earth", etc--is repeated, but poetry translation is more about poetry than translation.

The rhyme schemes of sonnets or other rhyming forms are an important part of the rhythms of those poems, and rhyme is one particularly powerful way of giving rhythmical structure to speech that might otherwise lack it.

The rhythms of poetry are the rhythms of the human body, and mind, unadorned by melody. Just as drums are the purest form of music, poems are the purest form of song, able to smuggle moments and experiences past the censors of the mind, unbounded by any meaning but their own.